Girlfriend in a Coma | 
|  | | | Title: | Girlfriend in a Coma | | Author: | Douglas Coupland | | Publisher: | Harper Perennial | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 March, 1999 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0060987324 / 9780060987329 | | List Price: | $13.00 | | You Save: | $0.26 | | Amazon Price: | $12.74 | |
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Product Description
After making love for the first time, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil confides to her boyfriend Richard of the dark visions she's been recently suffering. It's only a few hours later on that snowy Friday night in 1979 that she descends into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard, the protagonist of this disturbingly funny novel. Karen remains comatose for the next seventeen years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades; passing through careers as models, film special effects technicians, doctors, and demolition experts, before finally being reunited on a conspiracy-driven supernatural television series. Upon Karen's reawakening, life grows as surreal as their television show. With apocalyptic events occurring, Karen, Richard, and their friends explore the essential mysteries of life, faith, decency, and existence. Amid the world's rubble they attempt to restore their own humanity.
Amazon.com 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 semiresponsible 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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Unusual Commentary On The Meaning Of Life 04 January, 2007
On December 15th 1979, on the night after they first make love, Richard's girlfriend Karen goes into a coma. She wakes up 20 years later, mentally undamaged, to find her friends relatively unchanged (they seem t have just grown into their own expectations of themselves) and that she and Richard have a teenage daughter.
And just as she starts to recover, the rest of the world falls apart.
Yes, you do have to suspend disbelief, but it's worth it.
This is an unusual, original book with a unique storyline and an interesting (if somewhat clichéd) cast of characters who are searching for their meaning of life.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2XY7UO3HTBFLF
• So Close, And Yet... 10 September, 2008
I really, really wanted to like this book...and it came so close to winning me over. Unfortuantely, the last quarter of the book falls apart so quickly and so badly, that it ruins whatever good experience I had with the first three quarters.
The story is really interesting, and a quick read, throughout most of the book. Then, once the Supernatural Twist occurs, it just goes downhill. From there, Coupland spends FOREVER getting to the end, and he just rambles for several chapters until he gets to the letdown that is the ending. That letdown could've come about five chapters earlier, too, since one of the characters actually warns of it...again and again and again. "I've got something to tell these people", is what he essentially says, then spends five chapters getting around to saying it.
...And, when this "bombshell" is dropped, it's boring. Plenty of people on this site have given the ending away, so I won't do that. Suffice to say, it's simplistic, it's preachy, and it isn't remotely groundbreaking. In fact, it isn't even interesting. It's just pretentious, which is a shame because so much of the book was so interesting.
I really wanted to like this book, but it just spirals out of control near the end. It seemed thrown together, and ruined a book that would've easily gotten three or four stars from me had it not lost itself in the final act.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1WD3HMZJ3OZIV
• I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing. 20 January, 2007
Having now read "Life After God," "Microserfs" and "Girlfriend in a Coma" back-to-back-to-back, it's obvious that Coupland had a mortal terror of the emptiness and faithlessness of the '90s culture. This is the scariest, creepiest and oddest display of that fear.
The novel starts off in the late '70s when 17-year-old Karen loses her virginity on a skiing trip to boyfriend Richard and soon falls into a coma. Richard already lost one young friend to cancer (a jock named Jared, who acts as our narrator in the beginning and end of the book) and his girlfriend's tragic disappearing act is something he never truly gets over. The first section of the book shows us Richard and his friends -- sarcastic Hamilton, model Pam, lonely Wendy, smart but aloof Linus -- numbly trek into adulthood. They battle addictions, they question life, they marry -- and they all end up back in their old Canadian neighborhood.
Karen awakes two decades later to a world she finds disturbing -- empty, mindless worker drones simply existing. No free time, no fun, no leisure. While technology has grown stronger, she feels like the world has become emotionally cold and disconnected.
The frail, emaciated Karen reenters the life of her friends -- she gets to meet her daughter for the first time (she was impregnated by Richard on that night) -- and she also has visions of a coming apocalypse.
The apocalypse eventually arrives. The world "goes to sleep" -- people around the world simply pass out and die wherever they are. The aftermath is a world gone quiet. Streets filled with rotting corpses. Animals running wild in the street. The stink of death everywhere. Coupland has never been better than when he describes the horror of this plague. I think it may be the best writing he's ever done.
The friends and Megan (Richard and Karen's daughter) are the last people left on earth. Like all humans, they adapt to their situation. They watch videos and eat canned food.
At this point the three sections are like references to Stephen King -- "The Body" (a.k.a. "Stand by Me"), "It," and "The Stand."
Then things get "It's a Wonderful Life" as Jared rejoins the picture.
But the book goes deeper than that. In fact, before Coupland brings on his metaphor for our lack of beliefs and emotional remoteness, his book is quite sharp and effective in rendering the lives of his characters. Unlike in his previous novel, "Microserfs," where I often found it hard to identify with his characters, here I felt like I knew each one intimately. Some of their more cliche drug and drinking addictions are the point. Sometimes we're so lonely or angry or bitter that we don't know what to do but go to the cliche of drinking and drugs.
As horrifyingly real as the apocalypse is -- you can practically smell it -- I think Coupland's judgement is a wee too harsh. I think too much faith is just as bad as no faith at all. And I think religion (which is Coupland's major concern, it would seem) can be used too much to cover the reality of your problems.
Maybe my reaction is a bit of a "I resemble that condemnation" defense, but I don't think Coupland had to take the novel so far off the tracks, and I'm not really crazy about where the whole thing ends up (though the tone of the last section -- which is loose and blase -- will have you laughing).
But all flaws aside, this is an original, entertaining and powerful novel from a very talented author.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2M8O1WZRXMRQ9
• Maybe 2/3s Would Have Been Best 15 July, 2008
I was trying to select a book for my high school English class and I asked the librarian what a good book to choose was and she suggested Douglas Coupland and pointed me to this novel. A little aside here, it turns out she taught Coupland in English back when he was a young lad at Sentinel High School in West Vancouver (which is where the novel is set).
Also, since I'm from West Vancouver a lot of the setting was very close to home with references to shops and streets that I know so well. It's always sentimental like that I suppose.
Now onto the main plot. I really enjoyed the idea of having a someone go into a coma for 18 years (it's been about a year since I read it) and then awakening and suddenly having all her friends gone through the rest of the teens and 20s without her. Having a loss of that time would be heartbreaking to anyone. The changes that her friends go through are interesting a bit quirky and I enjoyed that. So why the 3 stars you may ask? Well it occurs about 2/3s of the way through the book just after Karen wakes up. Wow. I didn't like that at all. It was such a great story up until that point that I couldn't believe what I was reading. I can take a bit of bizzaro in my reading but this just destroyed it for me. I've since read more Coupland and I think this might not have been the best book of his to start off with reading.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2Z17Y2C4C704S
• A Story About Friends, Love And The End Of The World 09 December, 2006
This Stephen Kingesque story follows a group of friends who live on Rabbit Street in Vancouver, BC as they grow from their senior year in high school to their mid-thirties. Jarrod, or rather his ghost, narrates the first chapter. He was the jock, the football player who balled all the hot chicks, then one day he falls sick, shortly after he dies of leukemia. He was sixteen. The following year, Richard and Karen are on the slopes. The live next door to each other, have been friends since they were children and Karen wants Richard, wants to lose her virginity this night, right now, in the dark, in the snow.
Afterwards, she gives him a letter to give back to her tomorrow, unless for some reason, he can't, then he's to read it. Later they meet up with other friends from their street, Hamilton, the guy who always looks for the easy way, Pam the girl who will become a famous model and cover girl, Wendy who will become a doctor. They're supposed to go to a party where they're going to meet the last member of their troupe, Linus who will become an electrician before he becomes a seeker.
Karen who has been dieting like there is no tomorrow, because she wants to get into a size five bathing for her upcoming Hawaiian vacation, takes two Valium before drinking two week drinks. Then she falls into a coma. In the hospital Richard reads the letter. She predicted her coma and asks Richard to wait for her. And he does, for seventeen years. Even though she's pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl, Karen remains in the coma.
When she comes to she's thirty-four, frail, but lucid. She predicts the end of the world as we know it. And then everybody on the planet, except her five friends from the block and her daughter, who is now seventeen, dies.
And if that's not enough to suck you in, I don't know what is. Mr. Coupland's writing is lyrical, magical and captivating. His message is frightening, even though he gives his characters hope. This is a must read. I don't know why it took me so long to find it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A33HIQR1X1G4GI
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