Column
Continued praise for Douglas Coupland
I've just finished Douglas Coupland latest novel, Hey Nostradamus!, and I must confess that I am in utter awe of this work.
Dare I say that this book is the Mother of all Literature Masterpieces.
Forget all about your Wuthering Heights, your Moby Dicks, your Shakespeare Sonnets, your Catcher In The Ryes and your Ulysseses. This is the new standard in literature.
Sleeve notes from the author:
Several years after the 1988 Delbrook Senior Secondary School massacre, the television cameras have moved on to the next horror show; but for a handful of people in this sleepy corner of Vancouver, life remains perpetually derailed.
The book is told in four voices: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy who no one knew was her husband; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's dad Reg, a cruelly religious man no one suspects is worth loving.
This books reads as an allegory on the Bible's New Testament, a search in the depths of ultra-religion, a story of dealing with life's most difficult moments, a fable about never-ending undying love. This story has so many levels you need to read it more than once.
And it is a very emotional novel; it is the first book that brought me to tears. Ever. Especially Jason's part is heart gripping. The way Coupland lets Jason deal with the loss of his wife and the loss of innocence and the loss of lust for life feels extremely accurate and spot on.
Nowhere you get the feeling it is a work of fiction. It is more like the book contains testimonials from the things these 4 people have witnessed. This way as a reader you can fully empathize with what's being told. You might say this is Coupland's trademark, but in this novel he definitely crystalized it.
The events are carefully puzzled together throughout the book, so bit by bit you get to know what the protagonists have gone through and still are going through. Even though the novel spans 15 years you never have the feeling that you lose touch with the story line. I also think it shows that sometimes wounds need a lot of time to heal and, in the case of Reg, it takes a lot of time and a number of misfortunes to understand why he reacted the way he did and what effect those reactions had to the people close to him. And himself.
Coupland made sure that the final story didn't become like the ending of those sappy weekend TV movies. Granted, Reg tries to redeem himself, but it is executed honestly.
None of the characters put any blame onto the people that put them in the situation they are in; they all look at themselves and the errors of judgment they might have made. Playing the blame game would have been the easy way out for the writer, so I think it was a wise decision to avoid that pitfall, making it all the more a real experience.
Of course the book is in a way criticism on two things that are becoming more and more apparent in North American life: gun ownership and the (mis)use of it, and the role the media has in today's coverage of events.
The massacre at the Delbrook School of course is modeled after the Columbine shootings, but instead of focusing on the reasons for this sudden outburst of violence Coupland shows the ramifications on people who were close to the terrible events. We learn that the media played a doubtful role in the beginning of this shooting, but when public interest faded away they, in turn, lost their interest and moved on to the next big thing.
I, however, will not yet move on. I am going to read this wonderful, touching book again. I recommend you do the same.
Complete bibliography of Douglas Coupland:
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1991 1992 1994 1995 1996 1997 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 |
Generation X Shampoo Planet Life After God Microserfs Polaroids From The Dead Girlfriend In A Coma Miss Wyoming City Of Glass States God Hates Japan All Families Are Psychotic Souvenirs Of Canada School Spirit Hey Nostradamus! |
fiction fiction fiction fiction non-fiction fiction fiction non-fiction non-fiction fiction fiction non-fiction non-fiction fiction |
Editorial reviews of Hey Nostradaums!
Considering some of his past subjects--slackers, dot-commers, Hollywood producers--a Columbine-like high school massacre seems like unusual territory for the usually glib Douglas Coupland. Anyone who has read Generation X or Miss Wyoming knows that dryly hip humour, not tragedy, is the Vancouver author's strong suit. But give the guy credit for twisting his material in strange, unexpected shapes. Coupland begins his seventh novel by transposing the Columbine incident to North Vancouver circa 1988. Narrated by one of the (murdered) victims, the first part of Hey Nostradamus! is affecting and emotional enough to almost make you forget you're reading a book by the same writer who so accurately characterized a generation in his first book, yet was unable to delineate a convincing character. As Cheryl Anway tells her story, the facts of the Delbrook Senior Secondary student's life--particularly her secret marriage to classmate Jason--provide a very human dimension to the bloody denouement that will change hundreds of lives forever. Rather than moving on to explore the conditions that led to the killings, though, Coupland shifts focus to nearly a dozen years after the event: first to Jason, still shattered by the death of his teenage bride, then to Jason's new girlfriend Heather, and finally to Reg, Jason's narrow-minded, religious father.
Hey Nostradamus! is a very odd book. It's among Coupland's most serious efforts, yet his intent is not entirely clear. Certainly there is no attempt at psychological insight into the killers' motives, and the most developed relationships--those between Jason and Cheryl, and Jason and Reg--seem to have little to do with each other. Nevertheless, it is a Douglas Coupland book, which means imaginatively strange plot developments--as when a psychic, claiming messages from the Beyond, tries to extort money from Heather--that compel the reader to see the story to its end. And clever turns of phrase, as usual, are never in short supply, but in Cheryl's section the fate we (and she) know awaits her gives them an added weight: "Math class was x's and y's and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other," says (writes? transmits?) the deceased narrator. "They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids."
Amazon.ca & Amazon.com -- Shawn Conner
Readers of Douglas Coupland's more recent fictions have become accustomed to encountering characters touched by tragedy, whether it be falling into comas, surviving plane crashes or becoming infected with the AIDS virus after bizarre shooting incidents. Hey Nostradamus! is no exception: a novel in four voices. The opening narrator, Cheryl Anway, is the 17-year-old victim of a Columbine-style high-school massacre. Just before she was murdered in 1988, Cheryl had secretly married her high-school sweetheart Jason Klaasen and was expecting their child. The couple were part of a zealously evangelical Christian group, Youth Alive! whose members, immediately after the slaying, falsely accused Jason of masterminding the incident.
Eleven years later, Jason is still coming to terms with Cheryl's death. He is, as he admits to his faithful dog Joyce, a "social blank with a liver like the Hindenburg… embarrassed by how damaged he is and by how mediocre he turned out". (He fits bathrooms for a living.) Jason is also scarred by his relationship with his father Reg, a religious pedant so unyielding that he drove his wife into alcoholism and who genuinely believes that one of his identical twin grandsons cannot possess a soul.
Coupland persistently dissects notions of morality, faith, belief, forgiveness and devotion here. Even Reg, who leads the very final section of the story, is a multifaceted figure whose religiosity is handled with a surprising degree of compassion. Loss, however, is the main theme, exemplified by the fact that its two main characters are absent presences. Cheryl is dead throughout and by the time Heather, Jason's new partner, takes up the narrative, Klaasen has himself disappeared. His vanishing act forces her to engage Allison, the book's dubious Nostradamus; she is a fake psychic intent on ripping Heather off, yet mysteriously in possession of cannily specific "messages" from Jason.
The book's structure, epistolatory in parts, can make the story appear unfocused; some sections certainly err toward the frenetic, incident-wise, but Coupland's tremendous wit, humanity and moral force carry it along. As ever, splutters of dates and pop trivia mingle with profound reflections on life and death; surely, only Coupland nowadays could mark the time of day with a reference to McDonalds breakfasts and pull it off. That said, there's a very slight harking back to Life After God--the cartoon characters that Heather and Jason invent do seem rather similar to Doggles, the Dog who wore Goggles, and Squirrelly the Squirrel. Nonetheless, where those stories were about the "first generation raised without religion" this moving, prescient novel takes a long hard look at those who choose God, or have God thrust upon them.
Amazon.co.uk -- Travis Elborough
Coupland has long been a genre unto himself, and his latest novel fits the familiar template: earnest sentiment tempered by sardonic humor and sharp cultural observation. The book begins with a Columbine-like shooting at a Vancouver high school, viewed from the dual perspectives of seniors Jason Klaasen and Cheryl Anway. Jason and Cheryl have been secretly married for six weeks, and on the morning of the shooting, Cheryl tells Jason she is pregnant. Their situation is complicated by their startlingly deep religious faith (as Cheryl puts it, "I can't help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason"), and their increasingly acrimonious relationship with a hard-core Christian group called Youth Alive! After Cheryl is gunned down, Jason manages to stop the shooters, killing one of them. He is first hailed as a hero, but media spin soon casts him in a different light. This is a promising beginning, but the novel unravels when Jason reappears as an adult and begins an odd, stilted relationship with Heather, a quirky court reporter. Jason disappears shortly after their relationship begins, and Heather turns to a psychic named Allison to track him down in a subplot that meanders and flags. Coupland's insight into the claustrophobic world of devout faith is impressive-one of his more unexpected characters is Jason's father, a pious, crusty villain who gradually morphs into a sympathetic figure-but when he extends his spiritual explorations to encompass psychic swindles, the novel loses its focus. Coupland has always been better at comic set pieces than consistent storytelling, and his lack of narrative control is particularly evident here. Noninitiates are unlikely to be seduced, but true believers will relish another plunge into Coupland-world.
Publishers Weekly, copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Coupland, author of the cult favorite Generation X (1991), tells the story of a Columbine-like shooting from the perspectives of four narrators. First, there's Cheryl, killed in the shooting, who speaks from the afterlife. Then there's her boyfriend, Jason, who writes of living under a cloud of suspicion and surviving the cruelty of his radically Christian father, Reg. A woman whom Jason meets a decade after the shooting, Heather, narrates the third part, and the inflexible, evangelical Reg closes out the story. Coupland handles the diverse narrative voices impressively: Cheryl is endowed with a creepy mix of teen naivete and heavenly wisdom, and Reg writes with the complex syntax of a man who has read the Psalms one too many times. Unfortunately, Coupland's own ruminations on the theology of evil get in the way of his characters, draining the novel of much of its power. Still, there's enough here to interest Coupland's fans, who remain numerous even though his later books have not lived up to the promise of his early successes.
Booklist -- John Green, copyright © American Library Association.
René Wirtz
© René Wirtz 2000, 2001, 2003