This reminded me of books I'd get as hand-me-downs from my cousins, in a big box with some old gym shorts and maybe a forrest gump vhs. It's the type of book you find at a yard sale, and read because it has the same title as the Smith's song. And maybe one day at a barbeque you meet the one other person you'll ever know who read the book, and you two talk about what a bizarre experience reading this book was.. but you both admit you still think about it sometimes. it's that type of book.

Most of the narrative deals with the lives of a group of friends growing up in Vancouver in the late 70's-- it starts with them as 17 year olds and follows their experiences with drugs, relationships, careers, and the loss of their friend who goes into a coma. Everything is reasonable enough, 17 years pass & the characters turn thirty-four, over 200 pages of the book pass- their friend wakes up from her coma, AND THEN.... there is an apocalypse! so up to page 200 this is a coming of age book, then suddenly-- the world ends, and only this small group of friends is left on Earth. And then a ghost narrates the rest of the book.
To be fair, the ghost makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the book, so the esoteric spin was not a complete suprise.. but seriously, Girlfriend in a Coma feels like Douglas Coupland just got bored 200 pages in and started doing whatever he felt like until the book ended.

Still, it has its charm in an irrelevant, non-conformist 2-star-worthy way.

Coupland at his most heavy-handedly didactic and moralistic. Irritating in a manner surpassed only by the inanity of All Families Are Psychotic.

You know, sometimes there are books that make you happy, of course, then there are books that make you sad, yeah, but sometimes there is this one book that acts as a total singularity in everything you have experienced as a reader. This is one of them, and not really in a good way.

I am a big fan of Coupland, I know his weird weird fans and I myself kinda began to overlook some of his weird choices in storytelling. But before I say something bad about the book, let's first say something positive.
Of course the standard Coupland-wit is here, clever references to pop-culture, the lyrics from that Smiths-song, the snarky and sarcastic but kinda depressed characters, all there. What makes this book stand out from his other books however is its strongly focused storytelling, which is a big departure from his trailing off into semi-philosophical ranting that is so typical for him, which is really refreshing.
But considering the terrible stuff in this book, it is rather dumbfounding, because where Coupland is usually at his strongest, he completely and utterly fails on all levels here: THE PLOT AND ENDING

GOOD GOD, Coupland, what happened? I seldom have read a book with such a catastrophic plot like this one. Nothing makes sense, really, nothing. The plot-"twists" are not really twists at all, the subplot with Jared was rather idiotic and the ending of this book and the "moral" left my mouth so open, I was afraid of flies flying into it. I won't spoil anything here, though, for it is one ending that has to be read to be believed. Also, there is no character-development here. None. Zilch. Nada. All the characters act the same, even after certain happenings.

Do I recommend this book? Hard to say. For newcomers to Coupland, avoid this book at all cost. For interested people, give this a try, you could like some aspects of it. For Coupland devotees, sure, go ahead, there is enough to love here. But consume with care. MUCH care.

I was really enjoying the narrative in the beginning, but then it flipped into pseudo-philosophical, paranormal preaching which didn't feel inkeeping with the mood. Not what I was expecting, mixed feelings, here's a video to elaborate.

Missed this book when it came out and reading it now somehow it felt a bit out of kilter with today’s world - I’m not sure you would have a set of characters like these if you were writing it now ? It seemed unusual to read a book which put forward views that offered possibilities and optimism about humans and our world. Maybe we’re/I’m too cynical nowadays . Has the world changed or have I changed ? It was fun picking out the Smiths quotes and interesting considering the vision of the world post apocalypse as we are in the midst of our own comparatively minor meltdown.

This was not at all what I expected. This is my first Coupland book, and my impression of him (Mr Generation X) was that he would have a bit of an edge to him. He didn't.
I wasn't even sure that I liked the writing style at all when I started reading this book, but it kind of grew on me, and I almost enjoyed the first two parts.
But it soon deteriorated into a lot of new-agey drivel, and I only kept reading to the end because I thought he (Coupland) might redeem himself with irony ... but he didn't. It remained new-agey drivel to the end.

I truly just rate books based on how I feel about life after I read them. This one did not feel good, or even feel bad in a good way, but I normally do love Douglas Coupland to pieces.

Who would have thought the end of the human race would be so boring?

Though it reads like a proper Douglas Coupland, it gets bogged down in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape that doesn't do much of anything but depress the reader. I can't help but think that the book would have been better if the bulk of it had been set during the collapse rather than in the vacant-world aftermath. I'm a Gen-Xer all the way and so I can understand the pessimism that permeates a lot of '90s and '00s fiction. You can be pessimistic, you can be morose, you can be bleak, but what you can never be is dull. The material Coupland covers is too deep and important to be addressed with a shrug and a "whatever." Yes, I know that's the book's thesis: "The world is going to hell in a handcart and we Gen-Xers are just shrugging along. Let's not." But again, you can't get readers to pay attention to this powerful and worthy message if you bore them to sleep.

In many ways this is an atypical Coupland novel. The witty banter and the constant references to popular culture are there and the lost lonely people buffeted by consumer capitalism are there. But there is a different tone to this book, a melancholy attitude that pervades this narrative. It is a sad tale that is redeemed in the end. The story could have been humorous. I can imagine a Coupland book about a woman who falls into a coma at 17 and does not wake up until 32 being a non-stop clash between the world of the 70’s and the 90’s. There would be references to grunge music and computers and aging celebrities. But this is not that book. Here Coupland uses the coma as a metaphor for perpetual adolescence. Karen, the girl in the coma, awakens after getting sick at 17 and her friends are now in their thirties. The last time she saw them they were all at a graduation party preparing for college and adulthood. Karen never gets there, but neither does anyone else. The cruel truth is that no one has moved on from high school. They have taken on the trappings of adulthood, jobs, houses babies and drug use. But their interior lives have not changed. Their lives have no meaning.
tSo while this narrative still has problems – I don’t like the “angel Jared” character that much and it gets very preachy at the end. I respect what Coupland is trying to do. He is asking questions about the meaning of life and for that he is to be commended. He is challenging his characters and his generation to seek more. I found that deeply moving. And it makes not on the narrative redemptive, but the act of reading it redemptive as well.

Unusual, to say the least. Not an especially quick or gripping read, but there was something about it that seems profound, thoughtful, and mesmerizing.

reader in a coma

Karen is an ordinary girl in the shallow end of high school, with a questionable relationship with food and drugs but more or less well-adjusted. One day, she sees what appears to be a vision of the future and this is enough to sing her to sleep for 17 years.

She emerges from her coma in 1997, but pretty soon there's panic on the streets as a mysterious pandemic wipes everyone out. Now it's just her, her high-school friends and the daughter she birthed while comatose. How will they survive?

The book is more interesting while Karen isn't in it, taking a sort of Phillip Roth-ish look at the loss of meaning in the characters' lives (and therefore, allegorically, in humanity) despite engaging in the typically 80s and 90s pursuits - the Stock Exchange, real estate, modelling, drugs. If you are human and you need to belong, how can you be expected to achieve this in such a world?

Once Karen wakes up, and especially once the apocalypse comes, the novel needs to give its characters some sort of answer (or at least a clue). Coupland never supplies it, however, and the ending not only leaves an artillery of Chekov's revolvers lying around (why give characters skills in electrics, explosives etc and then give them nothing meaningful to do with them?) but renders most of the second act redundant. If the ghost of Shakespeare pops up post-Armageddon and asks me for a review of this novel I'd tell him William, it was really nothing.