GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA

Douglas Coupland

That's right, the guy that wrote Generation X, wrote this book, and regardless of how you felt about that novel, this one is worth your time. Trust me. Set in the late Seventies, Richard, our primary narrator, and Karen are two teenagers making love on a snow-topped mountain for the first time. Promptly thereafter, a pregnant Karen slips into a drug coma for two decades only to emerge to a despondent world where her high school friends are failing miserably to form cohesive identities or assert themselves into the world. Following her awakening and reuniting with the daughter she never met, Karen is given the premonition of a severely prosaic apocalypse, and we are treated to an unlikely and highly metaphoric end of the world, one replete with philosophical musings about questions of identity and human meaning in the coming millennium.

I found the use of a sort of magic realism at the end, when the world slips into a painless death via "sleep sickness" leaving only Richard, Karen, and their friends alive to deal with the ecological disasters created by unchecked machinery, to be as refreshing and intriguing as it was corny. Given the premise of the novel, a woman in a coma for twenty years, it is essential to suspend disbelief to read the novel in the first place. Once that is out of the way we are left with compelling and unique characters that loosely resemble people we know in real life and care about, making Girlfriend In A Coma a smooth and enjoyable read right up to the last page.