Girlfriend In a Coma - Hardcover

Coupland, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002243962 ISBN 13: 9780002243964

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998

Synopsis

On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers--modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition--before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse.

About this title

Review:

In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X--who is himself now a dangerously mature 36--boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon--lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well--for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semi-responsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment-- which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle--dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn--which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it.

Review:

.".. Coupland's dialogue is flip and fresh." -- New York magazine

"His strongest novel to date." -- People

His strongest novel to date. --People

."..a message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism."--USA Today

"His strongest novel to date."--People

"Part Stephen King, part It's a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X thrown in, Coupland's immensely readable . . . novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium."--Booklist

"To call Coupland the John Bunyon of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the...fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut...[A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play."--The Washington Post

.".. Coupland's dialogue is flip and fresh."--New York magazine

..". Coupland's dialogue is flip and fresh."--New York magazine

..".a message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism."--USA Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002243962
• ISBN 13: 9780002243964
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1