Douglas Coupland is one of my favourite authors, not to mention an absolute Canadian gem, but his last novel, The Gum Thief, felt tired and phoned-in to me. So, when I began to read his latest novel, Generation A, I wasn’t wholly optimistic. What I found though, as I went, is that Coupland is far from tired and while I don’t think he’s been at the top of his game recently—since jPod, I’d say—Generation A is nonetheless a winner.

Like the novel that it’s based upon—arguably Coupland’s greatest success—Generation X, Generation A styles itself as stories within a story. It collects together a handful of characters who are connected by a very interesting singularity and tells their stories. Like most of Coupland’s work, the novel is narrated in the first person except, in this case, there are several first-people and we hear the story, or stories, from several different perspectives. That alone is pretty interesting because Coupland has collected together some pretty interesting characters. And, the stories themselves—the plot, as it were—is pretty interesting too. Coupland is turning his zeitgeist-capturing antenna towards the near-distant future and telling us what he sees.

The stories within a story bit doesn’t really begin in earnest until closer to the end of the book when the characters are cobbled together and forced to storytell. For me, here’s where warning bells began to sound.

I worried that Coupland had, for lack of a better word, lost it. The Gum Thief, like I said, felt tired and bored. And here’s Generation A, marketed as a book which “mirrors” Coupland’s wildly successful Generation X. Is this where an author turns, I wondered, when he’s lost his craft? Is this how to cash in on a bit more of your cache? Doing that tired old story within a story thing? It didn’t work in The Gum Thief. I didn’t think it’d work here either, but I was wrong.

In fact, Generation A is compelling. I didn’t expect it to be.

Instead, the short stories told by Coupland’s characters were interesting. As stand alone vignettes they were great and truly illustrate Coupland’s prowess as a writer. Later, when the stories told by these characters begin to blend together, begin to draw off each other and intertwine to form a larger narrative it’s down right neat. But it isn’t merely a collection of stories, it’s a critique on the act of storytelling itself. It’s a narrative on the process and the importance of creating and telling stories, set in the highly-connected, not entirely unfamiliar distant future.

At times I had to get over the poor use of language and some pretty feeble writing but, at the same time, I had to remind myself that these stories were written by their characters. It’s not Coupland choosing a particularly ill-fit word: it’s his characters. At times it was a bit to get around. I don’t particularly relate to a guy who carves out crop circles that resemble giant genitalia, and I’m not wholly interested in what he has to say about parties, but I can understand the choice to write from that point-of-view.

While Generation A wasn’t the kind of finger-in-the-wind zeitgesit-capturing phenom that its spiritual prequel was,  it’s still a good book. It reminds you of the importance of telling a story. The interconnectedness of our high-tech world. It’s a book that, by its own nature, justifies its existence and, in the end, I think I’m OK with that.

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To any aspiring writer, learning that The Bishop’s Man is only Linden MacIntyre’s second novel is surely nothing short of depressing. MacIntyre’s story of one priest’s journey through the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals reads like he’s a writer who’s had lots of practice. He has, in a way. In the non-fiction realm, Linden MacIntyre is a well-known, award-winning investigative journalist. The host of Canada’s The Fifth Estate on public television and the often guest host of The Current on public radio, MacIntyre clearly has a prowess for fiction too.

The Bishop’s Man follows a priest as he lives, works, and survives through the abuse scandals that rocked the clergy in the early nineties. The story is set, in large part, in picturesque Nova Scotia. It’s here, in the details, that MacIntyre first impresses. His descriptions of the bleak maritime harbors, harsh maritime weather, and the lonely, solitary existence of his priest is the kind of stuff usually reserved for poets. It is, if I can put it plainly, remarkable use of language and imagery.

For his part, MacIntyre’s approach to scandal and abuse isn’t a finger-pointing or a blame-laying. Instead, he casts his main character as a kind of tragic hero, and this is probably closest to reality. MacIntyre’s priest is the bishop’s man, the man who’s job it was to fix a range of unpleasant situations within the church, but he is as much a regular man as anybody else. He’s troubled by what he’s done, and what he does. He’s a victim, often, of situations and of his calling, his vocation. He doesn’t like the men he’s charged with disappearing or the issues he’s charged with addressing, and struggles with what to do. The Bishop’s Man isn’t a book about laying blame or about easy answers but a book about messy life. It’s a book about real struggles and it’s here that the real power of MacIntyre’s message lies. The message that life is complicated, life is messy, and often life is hard.

MacIntyre explores the issues in The Bishop’s Man with a certain poignant clarity. His narrative moves effortlessly through time, drawing on situations and events from the past and weaving them into the present. His characters, as a result, live in a world rich with meaning and history. Like ourselves, like our realities, MacIntyre’s characters understand the importance of the strings that bind them to their pasts, their personal demons. MacIntyre’s flashbacks, often woven right into present-time narrative, are interesting and so fluid that, set against the backdrop of the snowy, frozen Maritimes, give his novel the feeling of a waking dream.

MacIntyre’s book follows in the long tradition of Canadian fiction: stories about our cold, foreboding winters and vast empty landscapes. But in that lineage, it deserves an important place. The Bishop’s Man is a well-executed piece of fiction, nearly, I argue, a piece of poetry. It takes us, along with its characters, deep into the human spirit—the spirit of suffering—and asks important questions. With the Catholic Church, again, entering a time of potential crisis this novel is more important, more poignant, than ever. It doesn’t offer easy answers, it doesn’t seek to pacify or lay blame, instead, MacIntyre offers us the human condition; life, in its coldest, hardest form. And to understand, this is where we must begin.

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Maria picked up Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend off the non-fiction new releases rack at our library. She knows me so well.

It was a pretty good read, in a way. Through the course of the book, the author, an “independent scholar” with a fairly strange name, Joshua Blu Buhs, sets out to frame the legend of Bigfoot in terms of its larger societal impact. From the outset, this seemed like a pretty interesting idea. I’ve had an interest in Bigfoot since, I think, I discovered my own big feet (size 12, not bad) so a book about society and the Bigfoot monster seemed like something good to read. But it was, to be sure, a little bit too good to be true.

Now, for those interested in Bigfoot, this book is a great read. In fact, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist and the foremost expert on Bigfoot gave this book a decent commendation but, as a view of Bigfoot in the bigger society, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and certainly isn’t what the author claimed he set out to explore. I mean, it’s good, but it isn’t sociology.

Instead, Blu Buhs takes us on a wild ride through the history of Bigfoot. Beginning with the infamous Yeti—the Abominable Snowman—Blu Buhs traces the history of various sightings and expeditions surrounding these “wild man” creatures. He introduces us to a whole collection of characters, Bigfoot enthusiasts and skeptics alike, who are colourful and wild in their own ways, all of them. (Seriously, what a host of characters.) We follow Blu Buhs through regional expositions, through newspaper archives and delve into aboriginal folklore and myth, and all of this is interesting, for what it’s worth.

But Bigfoot falls apart in two areas, and the first is an absolute deal-breaker.

In its outset, Blu Buhs says that he is setting out to understand the legend of Bigfoot and its impact on society, around the world. Big claim. Interesting goal. But he fails, utterly, to deliver. Instead, Blu Buhs gets lost in the person of Bigfoot, tracing back sightings, following up on leads, and taking us down through a maze of evidence and circumspect. Yes, that’s absolutely interesting, but it isn’t what he said he was going to do. When Blu Buhs does get down to sociological introspect it’s usually tacked onto the end of a chapter, it’s usually wholly half-baked(!) and it’s most certainly absurd. While a few interesting facts remain, like the impact of monster movies on independent cinema in the 1970’s, the large assertions and suggestions made by the author are unforgivable, lame, and seem to lack any real work on his part. And to be fair, I remember the feeling too, of tacking on a swiss cheese conclusion to the end of a term paper while not really believing it at all. Forgive me, Prof. Gorman.

The other major failing of this book is its chronology and immense roster. On the one hand, the number of intriguing personalities in the history of Bigfoot is wonderful. But on the other hand, it’s immense. The sheer number of characters that Blu Buhs is trying to work with makes the book very difficult to follow at times. I found myself constantly trying to remember who was who and, several times, although positive that a person hadn’t been mentioned before, their sudden appearance lacks any perspective or backstory. As if I should know who they were. The other bit is the chronology: the book jumps through time like the survivors from LOST, and while I like LOST, it can be damn confusing. Blu Buhs hovers in 1967 only to jump to 1972 then back to 1965, ad nausem. It’s a bit much.

All told, I liked this book, but probably because I’m a diehard. The history is interesting, engaging even, at times, but it isn’t the sociological investigation it claimed to be. I doubt anyone with a more pedestrian interest in Bigfoot would have the time or patience to sort through this tome at all.

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I received Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet for Christmas this year. At the same time I received the Talking Heads Greatest Hits record. This is an omen.

Understanding Shampoo Planet, I think, is the same as understanding what Talking Heads were doing back then. It’s about the future. It’s about a time in history when technology, innovation, and invention are racing forward at light-speed. At the same time, things are beginning to decay. Global warming is beginning to catch up with us; toxic waste and acid rain are seaping into the common lexicon. Advertising is everywhere. It’s all product, product, product, and this is called progress—a Shampoo Planet. This is what the Talking Heads are about, in my opinion, and this is what Coupland is getting at too.

This is Coupland’s second novel, following up on his incredibly successful Generation X. It feels like a second novel. It feels full of energy, packed with excitement, buzzy and confident. The novel follows a twenty year-old protagonist, a budding entrepreneur, obsessed with technology, the future, and business. His favourite book, he confesses, is the biography of a successful C.E.O., he expounds his love for things and his shower is a shampoo museum. At the same time, he senses decay all around him. His family is crumby, wrapped up in pyramid schemes and bad relationships. His town, once dominated by The Plants—factories which produced all kinds of wonderfully toxic and terrible things—are shutting down, the government moving in to clean up. He searches for meaning but things are moving so fast.

If I had a complaint about this book it would be about the section somewhere near the end. For the most part, Coupland’s writing style is crisp, quick and future-forward—it suits the plot well. But near the end it gets a bit mushy; the plot moves quickly, but the writing can’t keep up. It feels a bit stretched, but Coupland recovers in a huge way and comes through with a brilliant and honest conclusion to his character’s odyssey.

All told, Shampoo Planet is wholly authentic and that’s its selling point. If there’s one thing that Coupland is very good at, in my opinion, is taking the temperature of the times. Shampoo Planet is that temperature reading. Coupland nails it. Here he’s embedded deep in a culture that he understands very well: it’s the future, then, and it’s a great read.

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