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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Coupland a crafty salesman, but what is he selling?

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Hopkins

Posted: 09/6/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Generation A

By Douglas Coupland

Random House Canada, 320 pages, $33

Douglas Coupland thinks in pictures. The prolific Vancouver-based novelist is also a visual artist, sculptor, furniture designer.

But these talents do not translate, necessarily, into accessible or meaningful writing. Part horror movie, part science fiction, part fantasy, his 12th novel can't decide what it wants to be or where it wants to go. Odd, unnecessary plot twists confuse whatever message Coupland might be trying to communicate.

Set in 2024, it features an international cast of characters. The premise, borrowed from recent scientific warnings, is that bees are believed to be extinct; therefore, a pollination crisis ensues and many varieties of plants, flowers and farmers' crops are either threatened, or have disappeared.

Then five people in their late 20s and early 30s, from various parts of the world, are stung. Through this experience, and what follows, they become an inseparable group.

Coupland's novels portray modern society as a cultural wasteland, devoid of depth, creativity, individuality and intimacy. His first novel, Generation X, published in 1991, propelled him into the spotlight and coined a term that just won't go away, and this one is clearly meant to be a sort of bookend.

Members of Generation A (those under 20 today, as the late writer Kurt Vonnegut dubbed them) are similar, in that they both reflect a societal trend toward interpersonal disengagement and a reliance on, and an addiction to, technological, impersonal means of communication.

He seems to have become the embodiment of one of the characters he would disparage in his work: a self-marketing buzzword factory, whose stories ultimately have little depth or cohesion.

Although the whole of the novel is disappointing, Coupland manages to convey each character's personality through alternating narrative voices.

The plot, however, is absurd, and Coupland's tone is impossible to pin down. If his intention is to write an allegory, the message is obscure. If he's writing the story "straight," with no hidden agenda or symbolic meaning, it is truly awful.

Irrespective of his intent, though, as the novel progresses, the degeneration of a plot that had little going for it to start with leads to a head-scratcher of an outcome.

Coupland's saving grace is that some of his characters are likable and entertaining. Harj, from Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, and Diana, from North Bay, Ont., in particular, are quite funny.

Harj, as the outsider to Western culture, is in the best position to offer an alternative perspective on modern society. Having worked as a tour guide to wealthy young Americans visiting Sri Lanka, he has a keenly developed BS meter.

Diana, who suffers from Tourette's, is without pretence, and also in a good position to view the world a bit differently than the other three characters, Zack, Samantha and Julien, who have had more privileged lives.

Unfortunately, Coupland doesn't do much with the characters, instead choosing to focus on increasingly bizarre plot turns. It is a mystery how Coupland has become associated with defining a generation, as there seems to be little evidence to back up this idea.

If you're a Coupland fan, then you'll probably like his latest offering, too. There must be something to the guy, if he has become so popular.

It appears, however, that if some implicit meaning exists in this work, it would have been communicated better in a visual format.

Successful at promoting himself as a one-man cultural factory, Coupland is a crafty, intelligent salesman and, at best, a mediocre novelist.

Elizabeth Hopkins is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 6, 2009 B8

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