Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Girls, memory, parenting, millennial fear - all served Coupland-style.

Karen, an attractive, popular student, goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it, she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter; once out of it, a mere eighteen years later, she finds herself, Rip van Winkle-like, a middle-aged mother whose friends have all gone through all the normal marital, social and political traumas and back again...



This tragicomedy shows Coupland in his most mature form yet, writing with all his customary powers of acute observation, but turning his attention away from the surface of modern life to the dynamics of modern relationships, but doing so with all the sly wit and weird accuracy we expect of the soothsaying author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs and Polaroids from the Dead.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Girlfriend in a Coma Chapter One All Ideas Are True I'm Jared, a ghost. On Friday, October 14, 1978, I was playing football with my high school team, the Sentinel Spartans. It was an away-game at another school, Handsworth, in North Vancouver. Early on in the game I was thrown a pass and as I turned to catch it I couldn't help noticing how clean and blue the sky was, like a freshly squeegeed window. At that point I blacked out. I apparently fumbled the pass and I have no memory of what happened afterward, but I did learn that the coaches canceled the game, which was dumb because we were cleaning up and for all anybody knew, it was probably just a severe relapse of mono from two years earlier. But between that fumbled pass and a few hours later when I woke up in Lions Gate Hospital, I was diagnosed with leukemia--cancer of the bone marrow and hence the blood. Just three months later I died, on January 14, 1979. It was a lightning-speed progression for this particular disease. Before I died I lost all my hair and my skin turned the color of an unwashed white car. If I could do it all over again, I'd have hidden the mirrors from about Week Six onward. My life was happy and full and short; Earth was kind to me and my bout with cancer was my Great Experience. Unless, of course, we include my sex binge with Cheryl Anderson the week her parents were renovating and the whole family moved into The Maples motel for five days. That aside, I believe that unless a person passes through some Great Experience, that person's life will have been for naught. Such an experience doesn't have to be explosive or murderous or include Cheryl Anderson; often a quiet life of loneliness can be its own Great Experience. And I will also say this: hospitals are girl magnets. My room there quickly became a veritable parade float of flowers, cookies, knit goods, and girls who had quite obviously (and fetchingly) spent hours grooming. Such is the demented nature of the universe that I was too weak to properly respond to my being hit on by carloads of Betties and Veronicas--all except for the cheeky Cheryl Anderson who gave me 'manual release' the day I lost my eyebrows, followed by a flood of tears and the snapping of Polaroids in which I wear a knit toque. Gush gush. But back to right now--here, where I am, here at world's end. Yes, the world is over. It's still here but it's . . . over. I'm at the end of the world. Dust in the wind. The end of the world as we know it. Just another brick in the wall. It sounds glamorous but it's not. It's dreary and quiet and the air always smells like there's a tire fire half a mile upwind. Let me describe the real estate that remains one year after the world ended: It is above all a silent place with no engines or voices or music. Theater screens fray and unravel like overworn shirts. Endless cars and trucks and minivans sit on road shoulders harboring cargoes of rotted skeletons. Homes across the world collapse and fall inward on themselves; pianos, couches, and microwaves tumble through floors, exposing money and love notes hidden within the floorboards. Most foods and medicines have time-expired. The outer world is eroded by rain, and confused by lightning. Fires still burn, of course, and the weather now tends to extremes. Suburban streets such as those where I grew up are dissolving inside rangy and shaggy overgrown plants; vines unfurl across roads now undriven by Camaros. Tennis rackets silently unstring inside dark dry closets. Ten million pictures fall from ten million walls; road signs blister and rust. Hungry dogs roam in packs. To visit Earth now you would see thousands of years of grandeur and machinery all falling asleep. Cathedrals fall as readily as banks; car assembly lines as readily as supermarkets. Lightless sunken submarines lumber to the ocean's bottom to spend the next billion years collecting silt. In cities the snow sits unplowed; jukeboxes sit silent; chalkboards stand forever unerased. Computer databases lie untapped while power cables float from aluminum towers like long thin hairs. But how did I end up here? And how long am I to stay here? To learn this, we need to learn about my friends. They were here, too--at the end of the world. This is the place my old friends came to inhabit as well--my friends who grew old while I got to remain forever young. Question: would I do it the same way all over again? Absolutely--because I learned something along the way. Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance--after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy--you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end. So here follows the story of friends of mine who finally learned their lesson: Karen, Richard, Pam, Hamilton, Wendy, and Linus. Richard's the best talker of the group so in the beginning the story is mostly his. Karen would have been better but then Karen wasn't around Earth much in the beginning. C'est la vie. But then Richard's story only takes us so far. The story gets bigger than him. It includes them all. And in the end it becomes my story. But we'll get to that. Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers. 18-25-32 . . . Hike! Girlfriend in a Coma . Copyright © by Douglas Coupland. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

A high school senior makes love on a ski slope, then mixes drinks and drugs at a wild party and falls into a 17-year coma. She wakes up to find she has a daughter, delivered nine months into her coma. Her friends all seem diminished by the passage of time. Her boyfriend laments, "What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?" Not long after, a plague kills off everyone on Earth but her friends. Even more bizarre happenings follow, leading to an unconvincing denouement. For the most part, however, Coupland (Generation X, LJ 10/1/91) has crafted a moving chronicle of the impoverished inner lives of a circle of materially rich young adults of the Nineties. Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in terms of what it consumes and not what it could achieve.‘David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

"I'm Jared, a ghost." Thus begins Coupland's latest, a novel that starts out ever so promisingly, only to shift gears and run out of gas two-thirds of the way through. The opening line introduces a supernatural element, as Jared, former high-school football star of the Sentinel Spartans in Vancouver, recalls collapsing during a game and dying six weeks later of leukemia. Now he is haunting a postapocalyptic wasteland. How did the world end? His best friend, Richard, continues the narration, recounting the story of six close friends reeling from the loss of their friend Jared only to then lose Karen, Richard's girlfriend, who goes into a coma in December 1979 after ingesting a couple of Valiums and a vodka-and-Tab cocktail, leaving her friends adrift for 20 years in the moral quagmire of the 1980s and 1990s. When she awakes, a veritable Rip Van Winkle, she has a unique perspective and can, therefore, be Coupland's mouthpiece for commenting on the state of things and the hollowness at the core of her friends' and everyone else's lives. Coupland excels at developing vivid and real characters, but he is best when he sticks to the milieu he knows so well, that of edgy post^-baby boomers. Part Stephen King (The Stand [1990], Dead Zone [1979]), part It's a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X (1991) thrown in, Coupland's immensely readable new novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium. --Benjamin Segedin

Kirkus Book Review

The writer who gave a generation its well-deserved ""X"" returns to the quasi-theological themes of his third novel, Life After God (1994), and again wanders off into spacey, New Age platitudes about death and transcendence. Although God makes no personal appearances here, He's represented by the ghost of an 18-year-old football player whose life touched all the aimless souls wandering through this media-literate narrative. After a gimmicky prologue in the voice of the dead Jared, Coupland soon shifts gears, displaying a new-found maturity and sharpness. Spanning two decades in the close-knit lives of friends in Vancouver, his kinetic text begins with the episode that lands the narrator's girlfriend in her 18-year coma. But whether it was the mix of pills and booze or Karen's premonition of a dreary future that rendered her comatose, the tragedy reverberates among her pals, whose lives will spiral out of control over the next two decades. Her boyfriend, Richard, the narrator, remains a faithful visitor to her bedside, through his go-go years as a stockbroker and his bouts of alcoholism. Of course, he must deal with their growing daughter, conceived the night before Karen's coma and unaware of her mother for seven years. And Karen's friends, to a person, all feel like losers, despite successful careers as a supermodel (Pam) and a doctor (Wendy). Drugs, overwork, and sheer boredom trouble even the seeminglycentered Linus, who eventually returns to Vancouver with all the rest. With everyone sleepwalking through life, Karen miraculously awakes, but her worst visions come tree--and here the story veers into disaster-movie--land, with a sleep-inducing plague overwhelming the planet. Jared returns to teach them about self-sacrifice and the need to change their lives, relying on all sorts of utopian blather and spiritual nostrums. Sappy at its core, but showing signs nonetheless of Coupland's evolution as a novelist not wholly dependent on trend-spotting and zeitgeisty patter. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.