I'm potently fond of Coupland's writing style, and most of the things I've read by him I get why he leaves the story where the book ends, but for this one I wanted more.

This is the worst book I've ever read and I've read in-progress drafts from beginning writers. There's zero difference in the narrative voices. There's a gimmick for how the story is being told (ex: a letter, notes by a court stenographer compelled to tell her story). The plot is laughable and the character reactions could be called "unrealistic" if the characters themselves behaved the least like actual people. I mean, "Well someone saw us together in this Vegas hotel lobby so, naturally, I killed him." (not actual quote, just actual storyline)

I read this for a book club. It was the only book I read for the book club. I would sell it except that I feel wrong inflicting this literary pain on other people.

BTW: Coupland seems to have some very rabid supporters. When I blogged a longer review after reading it and then a shorter, softer review at Amazon, they came out of the closet to tell me how I didn't "get it" and how ludicrous my opinion is. They're entitled to that opinion and I'm entitled to mine: this book sucks.

I was looking for a lot more out of this book based on the descritpion. It started off fairly strong for me, but then quickly began to unravel as the story progreesed. Each transition in narrator was another blow to the integrity of the story. The characters were weak and surprisingly unrealistic. I think I completely lost interest in what was going on by the time the whole fake psychic came into the picture. I was only slightly intrigued as to what happended to Jason and didn't really care at all about his girlfriend that he disappeared on.

Original Sin in British Columbia

Original Sin is real. It’s called language, especially language badly used. Sometimes this sin is redeemed by the beautiful, or startling, or at least interesting, use of language in fiction. Hey Nostradamus is an instance of entirely unredeemed original sin, an example of writing because one can write with nothing much to write about. Perhaps that’s the author’s point, the vacuity of life in Vancouver.

What starts as a YA account of her death by a naive teenage religious fundamentalist turns into a bizarre story of Canadian Noir. The bleak side of Vancouver’s smug suburban calm is the central topic. Although a Canadian city, Vancouver is culturally part of the American Pacific Rim, more like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles than Calgary, Toronto and Quebec. Not a twin but an analog, something with the same general features but a particular identity. Or as religious people say: a soul.

Vancouver has the same chain restaurants as the cities further South, the same automobiles, the same adverts, and the same crumby motels. It faces the Orient with its back to the mountains and the biggest highways run South not East. The Union Jack and the Confederate Stars and Bars are analogous, both designating distinctions with subliminal power. Its snobbery is all West Coast. Even though it thinks itself special, it’s really only Orange County in the rain.

Nevertheless, according to Coupland, Vancouverites are particularly strange folk. High school kids elope to Las Vegas; a man agrees to impregnate his sister-in-law hours after his brothers death (but only in Las Vegas!); the sister-in-law casually commits murder to conceal the conspiracy (once again Las Vegas, the safety valve for all West Coast cities); the man himself disappears, so his girlfriend (not his sister-in-law, pay attention) goes in search of... well not him but his analog who is understandably upset at being ‘found’ (not in Las Vegas surprisingly but in Portland, an analogous city).

What appears to be a constant among these characters is an obsession with self-expression. They all feel compelled to write - about a high school massacre, religious hypocrisy, vague international drug deals, counterfeiting, gangland revenge, the search for the mythical Sasquatch, a phoney psychic who knows about running a good scam, and the psychic’s mark who, incredibly, participates in it.

These epistolary adventures have no real narrative connection with each other. Each occurs and is then left hanging as a fact the reader is meant to absorb and forget. Each narrator refers to him or herself largely in the third person. Obviously they are all the author in not very convincing incognito. Equally obviously, the adventures are not his own. What then is the subject of this fiction? Ah yes, the city, the city whose uniqueness apparently lies in its particularly weird residents, none of whom are particularly believable... or interesting. Too bad about Vancouver’s lack of soul.

best coupland in a long time and though there are still annoying parts, it certainly doesn't blur together like some of his other books in the last 10 years.

the good parts are so unerringly perfect and divine. the idea makes me giddy with excitement (the first quarter is narrated by a 16-year-old born again christian girl who's just been shot in a high school massacre, and is in some place after death but still without knowledge of whether there is a heaven or hell or just nothingness), and after reading this I had new resolve that coupland is my favorite modern author.

Reread buddy listen with the husband! December 2023

Whew, this book still evokes so many emotions. But such a great read/listen. And honestly the audiobook is 10/10 stars for me personally. Might pick it back up in another 5 years.

4.5 stars

This book, man I really did enjoy it. There was just something about it that drew me in so wholly. And it gave me a massive book hangover. Some of the content is sad and quite depressing at times, but it's very well written and narrated.

Hey Douglas!... you can do way better than that!
I am giving an OK just because it was flowing, and I love Coupland's style. But to be honest this book was on the boring side. Although Coupland is one of my favorites, he sometimes (like this time) repeats himself, or even "copycats" his own books. With this one he could have saved the time writing it.

After reading JPod, I swore to myself I would still read this book in spite of how unbelievably horrible JPod was. Hey Nostradamus! was pretty good, even if DC relies on so many of the same conventions throughout his books -- hired foreign goons, lengthy descriptions of Vancouver, listing things that are depressing about living alone, parents' quirky sex lives, etc. -- that I spent the entire first fourth of this book trying to figure out if I had read it before. By the end, I was sure I hadn't, and reasonably glad that I hadn't gotten confused and stopped reading.

Warning: Do not read this while depressed.

My primary coping mechanism whilst depressed is reading. But picking up a random work from the stack of 200 or so unread books isn't gonna do the job. The book has to be undemanding in terms effort to read and preferably plot-driven and gripping. James Blish was my go-to author in this circumstance for many years but I've read all his novels too many times in recent years. Ditto a number of other authors who I know would fit the bill. Which leads back to the unread pile and taking a bit of a risk. Hence Douglas Coupland who has only let me down once in half a dozen or so books and has always been fairly compelling. Now, across all the books I've read by Coupland, the general themes have remained constant; how to cope with a modern world that isolates people and offers no automatic purpose in life. The reason this hasn't become boring or tiresome is that he seems to come at the question from an at least slightly different angle each time, his answers aren't always the same (if he gives any in that particular book) and the general tone and mood varies too. So in Generation X we are offered, run away to Mexico, as a solution. In Microserfs, make virtual Lego (or is that Jpod?) or more seriously, work for yourself, not some giant inhuman corporation. In Miss Wyoming, running away doesn't work - so Generation X turns out not to have the right answer after all. And so on. Some of these are post-modern and ironic, even openly comic e.g. Generation X and Jpod. Others are more or less earnest, like Eleanor Rigby and Miss Wyoming. And here's the risk - some are really upbeat and others are not. This one also shows Coupland's great skill with first person voice character-creation.

So Hey Nostradamus! Starts with a school shooting massacre obviously intended to be reminiscent of the Columbine incident and then gallops off into a discussion of religion, redemption, despair, forgiveness and how parents can screw up their children. The plot is gripping but in retrospect completely preposterous and goes off in directions I would never have guessed. The protagonists have various fates and one is left to sift through the aftermath and try to figure out what, if anything, Coupland is saying about Christianity. It's no straightforward thumbs up or thumbs down. And the outcome for some people is optimistic, for others - well - don't read this book if you are depressed.

After reading two of Douglas Coupland's books I've decided that the reason I don't love his writing is because it reads like a detective fiction without the detective. He seems to really enjoy adding in a wild twist or turn that is barely plausible in real life. If he ever writes an actual detective fiction book, count me in. Until then, so long, Doug.

n  "What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives."n

A strange, endearing novel from 2004 that's sort of about the aftermath of a Columbine-esque school shooting and sort of about the smothering grasp of Christian fundamentalism and sort of about the interconnectedness of all human life and sort of just about the weirdness of being a person in the world, or at least in turn-of-the-millennium suburban Vancouver. Not something I'd have ever picked up or even heard of if it hadn't been recommended to me by my partner, but in the end I'm happy it was.

Throughout the novel Coupland makes use of a snarky, jaded voice which could easily become grating if done carelessly, but he infuses it with enough earnest pathos and genuine affection for his characters that it never crossed that line for me. It's a book in four chronological sections, 1988 - 2004, each with a different (though always Couplandian) narrator. The first section concerns a victim of that school shooting I mentioned above, and you think the whole book is going to circle that topic in one way or another, but by the end—sixteen years later—the massacre is really only a far-off catalyst for a lot of subsequent character development. The event still reverberates, of course, but for better or worse life goes on.

There are a few reviews on here complaining that Hey Nostradamus! is "unrealistic," owing mainly to one (admittedly) melodramatic and undwelt-upon plot twist midway through, but I think so-called "realism" is too much of a preoccupation these days and it's not really what Coupland is going for anyway. (The first chapter is narrated by a dead person, after all.) Little that happens in this novel is strictly impossible, but it's all heightened, all a little OTT, and that's a perfectly acceptable stylistic choice: what's important is that a book is believable within its own context, which I think this one pretty much is. You just have to accept that context first.

Several of Coupland's characters are current or ex-evangelical Christians, to varying degrees of devoutness, and I can personally confirm the accuracy of those depictions. I recognized everything from the cultlike conformity of the teen youth-groupers to the agonizing cognitive dissonance of a man whose intellectual and moral compasses are leading him further and further from the faith he's built his life upon. There are no shortage of flat, monstrous fundamentalists in fiction, but Coupland writes about these people like someone who's been one of them, or at least known them intimately. That unexpected recognition was my first clue that I was in capable authorial hands, and I'm eager now to see where Coupland's other books take me.

There are some writers who plan out the general arc of their books before they sit down and write. They spend lots of time building the world and knowing where they are in time and space. I would guess Coupland doesn’t do that. I’d say he doesn’t because I feel the ride that he’s being taken on as I read (listen) to his books.

His characters, their believability, their thoughts, their actions… it’s a ride.

I do feel like Coupland touches on some themes in this book that don’t get to be explored completely. He touches on them but never pushes. I wonder where he was in his life when he wrote this.

I was a Jr. in high school.

Girlfriend in a Coma is one of my favorites of his.