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.
Hey Keith!
Good review. I, too, enjoyed Generation A and was glad to see that Coupland had recovered from The Gum Thief fumble. Like you said, the stories shared by the characters really made the book for me. Coupland’s creative bursts are why I love his books. The one part of the book that I was disappointed with was the ending. I won’t give the ending away but I felt that he concluded it too abruptly. I found this quite disappointing because Coupland usually finishes so strong.