Customer Reviews

Generation A: A Novel

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I'm a fan of Douglas Coupland, whose writing in many ways reminds of Kurt Vonnegut (an author that I think Coupland has an affinity for - in fact the book's title is derived from a Vonnegut quote). Unlike Vonnegut though, Coupland has not yet (in my humble opinion) delivered a novel anywhere near the calibre of Slaughter-House Five or Cat's Cradle.

As entertaining as Generation A is on many levels, it feels too familiar. Coupland has the potential to write something truly extrodinary but it seems to me that he only provides us with glimpses of brilliance, unable to grow beyond what he has already shown us he can do. Generation A feels like a blending of Generation X and Girlfriend in a Coma.

Generation A is set in the near future. A future without bees (they suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the planet and along with them, the flowers and fruit that they pollinate). Then, in the course of a few short months, five `20-somethings' in different parts of the world are stung. The five young people become instant celebrities and are whisked off for scientific study. The bees are symptomatic of the health of the planet and the occurrence of these bee stings sends a message of hope to the world.

The story is told from the rotating points of view of the five young people: A corn farmer and artist of sorts who makes extra cash by filming himself naked from his tractor to internet subscribers, a young woman in New Zealand who uses the internet to make "earth sandwiches" with cyber friends on the other side of the world, a French student obsessed with `World of Warcraft' just coming off 114 days of consecutive play, a fundamentalist Christian with Tourette's syndrome, and a customer service call center rep from Sri Lanka.

The five young people are characterized by an alienation or purposelessness in their lives. They have no real meaningful relationships and `connect' with their world through technology (webcams, email, videogames, social networking `friends', websites, and blogs) or, in the case of one character, religion. Unlike most of the world around them though they have no interest in taking a new drug that is becoming popular around the world. The drug eliminates anxiety that people have about the future, causing them to think only of the present and to feel internally fulfilled without the need for any human interaction. The drug is like a solitary escape from reality, much like the feeling you might get when lost in a good book, but multiplied.

Coupland is an astute observer and his writing is filled with remarkable insight and clever, often hilarious pop culture references. Zack, the Iowa farm boy writes: "When I was growing up, Mother Nature was this reasonably hot woman who looked a lot like the actress Glenn Close wearing a pale blue nightie. When you weren't looking, she was dancing around the fields and the barns and the yard, patting the squirrels and French kissing butterflies. After the bees left and the plants started failing, it was like she'd returned from a Mossad boot camp with a shaved head, steel-trap abs and commando boots and man, was she pissed."

Where the novel falters a little is in its lack of subtlety regarding its themes. There are few connections that the reader has to make for himself as the characters speak openly and plainly about the central themes of the novel. This comes across as a little preachy at times, or at the very least, it makes me feel as if the author doesn't respect the readers ability to `get it' without spelling it out over and over again. Coupland's characters, as in previous novels, are hyper-aware of themselves and life's grander themes. We may be connected in a digital world but it also isolates us. Digital communication (and religion) is a poor substitute for real, meaningful human interaction. By sharing our stories with one another we can reconnect.

Coupland's novels tend to alternate between the reasonably normal (real people in the real world having real experiences - like Microserfs) and more speculative fiction (where things can get a little bizarre and surreal - like Girlfriend in a Coma). Some people might read a novel like Generation A expecting it to be "normal" only to become increasingly perplexed when it departs from conventional reality.

The bottom line: this is an imaginative and inventive novel. Like all of Coupland's novels, even when they fall a little short, it's a remarkably entertaining read. The novel is filled with a number of stories within stories, and one of them, the tale of Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis, is worth the price of admission alone. I can't help but feel that Coupland came up a little short in the end (again) but maybe I'm just expecting too much from him.

I can't say that I've loved every word Douglas Coupland's ever written, but by and large I enjoy his work quite a lot. His novels are observant, quirky, and very funny. So, I was looking forward to Generation A. And I enjoyed reading it, but I wanted to like it so much more than I did. I think my biggest problem is that I felt like I was reading two different books. The first half of this novel did not seem to match up with the second.

The novel is primarily told from the points of view of five individuals from five different lifestyles and countries. What bonds them is that they all share an extraordinary experience. They are each stung by a bee--at a time (roughly the year 2024) when no one's seen a bee for five or six years. They've long been assumed extinct, and the world suffers for it. Fruits and flowers are incredibly rare, and must be labor-intensively hand pollinated. Honey is like gold. The bees are essentially the canaries in our coal mine, and the future isn't looking too bright.

This is so much an issue, that there's a new, hyper-addictive drug on the market called Solon. It keeps users in the present, instead of all that pesky worrying about the future. It also makes time pass quicker and helps alleviate loneliness, so that users can "live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety." So, it is in this near future that Zack from Iowa, Samantha from New Zealand, Julien from Paris, Harj from Sri Lanka, and Diana from Canada become instant worldwide celebrities--and subjects of scientific scrutiny.

And I was really engaged in this somewhat bizarre story. I was totally digging it! But as things moved forward, the plot veered off into left field. For reasons I won't get into, the B5 (as they are called) spend the second half of the novel telling each other quirky stories they've made up. Very little happens as a series of sometimes charming short stories are recited, and the ideas behind Coupland's satire are driven home.

Eventually there are revelations that somewhat tie the two halves of the novel together, but I found the ending to be weird and somewhat grotesque. There were definitely pleasures to be had in the reading of this novel. Coupland's just too darn good for that not to be the case, but Generation A never quite came together as a cohesive work.

I couldn't help keep thinking of the movie "The Happening" as I was reading this novel. Both have fairly similar themes - "disjoint people connected by a rare super-natural event". well, that has been a plot for more than a few movies or books... The novelty factor of the bees (the supernatural connection in this story) wears off quickly, drowned in the dry humor and eerily similar narratives and narration styles by characters who are supposedly very different. That was disappointing considering how engaging the beginning of the novel was. The major plot of the novel(mentioned in other reviews) is quite successful in painting a futuristic landscape without having to make significant leaps of faith. But somewhere along the way in attempting to provide different narratives for the protagonists, the plot goes off in tangential directions (so many of them, that the author finally is forced to rush into a conclusion - maybe the editor was counting pages). Overall, an OK read.

(Perhaps, I am missing something as a first time Coupland reader - but this book doesn't make me want to revise my favorite authors list)

Capturing the pop cultural references and post adolescent ambivalence of the late eighties and early nineties, Douglas Coupland connected with the zeitgeist of a generation looking for commonality. He sought to explain the mythical Generation X. Being an early fan of Coupland's, particularly work like "Generation X" and "Shampoo Planet," I was definitely intrigued to pick up "Generation A" to see how far we've progressed. I was immediately captivated by the story of five young adults spanning the globe who are stung by bees. Not that unusual? But the novel is set in the near future in a world where bees have become extinct. These "stingings," thus, create quite a media storm and all five become quasi-celebrities of the electronic age as well as scientific experiments.

As the five are rounded up from the United States, Canada, France, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka--the world becomes obsessed by what makes these individuals special. All are isolated in their own way using media, as opposed to real contact, to define their interactions with other people. So why were they chosen? What do they have in common? And what are the "bees" trying to tell us? Brought together under suspicious circumstances, the five are encouraged to make up and share stories. And while this development struck me as odd, our characters go with it. So while the first half of the novel as been a nifty plot driven narrative, the second half moves into a series of interconnected stories.

The unrelated stories all have similar themes centering around communication or the lack there-of as well as evolving and devolving language. Soon the central point is being made that technological advancement has narcotized the world instead of making it stronger. And while not the freshest idea, it's a point well made. Much of "Generation A" is amusing and I definitely recommend it. Similarly structured to the classic "Generation X," Coupland's latest doesn't exactly feel groundbreaking--but I'm glad I read it.

"A" is for apple, and where would we be without them? It's funny to realize that although apples, like the letter A, were there at the beginning (think Adam, think Eve), the last apple you ate probably didn't exist until about 100 years ago. Granny Smiths started in 1868, Golden Delicious in 1900. Mucking about with nature doesn't always end in disaster.

Canadian author Douglad Coupland's 2009 novel, "Generation A", is also about beginnings, and apples, and mucking about with nature, though his take is more acidic Granny than sweet Golden. Despite some excellent writing, however, the book is an excellent beginning in search of an end, and A without a Z, a flower waiting for a bee.

Mr Coupland first buzzed into the public conscience on the wings of his high-flying 1991 novel, "Generation X", which for better or worse helped popularize "Gen X" as handle for those born in the 60s and 70s. I admit that, in a fit of contrarianism familiar to anyone who has ever been 17, I never read the book precisely because of its popularity. My confident predictions that Mr Coupland would be quickly swatted away have been decisively disproved over the last 19 years, as Mr Coupland has continued to pollinate popular culture with a steady stream of both non-fiction work and novels, of which "Generation A" is his thirteenth.

Over the years I have at times bumped into Mr Coupland's works on bookstore shelves, each time experiencing the disquiet I normally reserve for new Pearl Jam albums or Rutger Hauer movies--are you allowed to stay popular for 20 years? It all seems so old-fashioned somehow. Fittingly, the disconnect between popular culture and the individual has been a recurring theme in Mr Coupland's novels over the years. His work has hovered between consistency and repetitiveness, always engagingly and amusingly written, balancing mysticism and realism, although he tends to revisit similar situations and themes. Often, the strength of the writing overcomes the touch of déjà vu you feel on cracking open one of Mr Coupland's books.

Not surprisingly then, "Generation A" (Aha! Thought I'd never get around to it, didn't you?) is in many ways an echo of "Generation X". The structure is the same, with a framing narrative used to set the stage for the five main characters to tell a series of stories. The characters themselves are Mr Coupland's usual suspects, social outsiders in various stages of anomie, twentysomethings trying to extract meaning from a random universe.

"Generation A" is set in a near-future in which bees are believed to be extinct (this was a topical issue in 2007-8, when there were stories of mysterious disappearances of bee colonies; it now appears reports of their extinction were exaggerated). Believed to be, that is, until five young people in countries around the world are all stung. First is Zack, an Iowan corn farmer with ADD and a reckless streak. Then there's Julien, a socially awkward shut-in who spends his life in World of Warcraft, Diana, a religious Canadian dental hygienist with Tourette syndrome and Samantha, a New Zealander gym trainer. Rounding out the quintet is Harj, a Sri Lankan orphaned by the 2004 tsunami who works as a telemarketer for Abercrombie & Fitch.

The five are first put in isolation, extensively studied, and then released. Thanks to the Internet, they each discover they have become major celebrities without the compensation of celebrity paychecks. It comes as a relief when one of the scientists whisks them all away to a secluded island off the coast of British Columbia, where he instructs them to tell stories as a way of prompting their bodies to secrete proteins that may have attracted the bees.

It's much like Mr Coupland's other books. If you haven't read them, it's a bit like Douglas Adams on drugs, or Chuck Palahniuk off of them. The other obvious comparison is to fellow Vancouver author William Gibson; the two share a fascination with popular culture and technology, though Mr Coupland seems less enthusiastic on where they are taking us. As a result, his tone is more direct and satirical than Mr Gibson's. In "Generation A", the words positively sting. Diana's ex-boyfriend smells "of Rogaine and failure", Harj's call-center job involves discussing "colour samples and waffle-knit jerseys with people who wish they were dead."

However, some of this waspish criticism feels cheap and easy. Globalization has become this year's political correctness, the soft target that nobody will stand up for. Abercrombie & Fitch are already something of a self-parody. And do we truly live in a "fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information"? Maybe. Some people do, I guess. But that leaves millions upon millions who don't have a Facebook account, couldn't care less about Rihanna or Justin Beiber, and whose only use for a cell phone is, er, to make phone calls. Mr Coupland demolishes this straw man effectively, but I feel his anger is largely misplaced.

On a technical level, there is a lot to like here. The first half of the book, as we are introduced to each character and watch their reactions to becoming specimens in a jar, is some of Mr Coupland's sharpest, juiciest writing. The second half, not so much. As amusing as it all is, the whole thing starts to feel a bit false. I don't for a minute believe any of the characters introduced in the first half would come up with the stories presented in the second. Mr Coupland champions story-telling as a means of creating order in our lives, but the ending is a chaotic, gooey mess. It's the literary equivalent of "Lost", 300 pages leading up to and ending that leaves you feeling a bit cheated.

It's as though you're reading two books awkwardly grafted together--one, a smart, biting social critique set in a nicely downbeat near-future, where mankind's doom is more apathetic than apocalyptic; the other, a weird mish-mash of offbeat short stories suddenly cut off by a "what the--?" ending. No guesses which of the two I'd rather be reading.

Still, grafting is what gave us the Golden Delicious, and there's still plenty to savor here. Just don't let the ending leave you with a bitter aftertaste.

I have loved just about everything Coupland has ever written. Generation A, while written well, seems like Coupland just wrote it to pay the bills. It's like it's his own joke. Let's market a book and give it a name that reflects the great hype surrounding Generation X and make it fall flat and THAT IS THE JOKE. It could have been so much more. The narratives the characters told were just completely unnecessary for the most part. He could have written cultural indictments in many other ways. It was about as self-indulgent as Brett Easton Ellis' Lunar Park except that for most of Coupland's writing, we seem to be in on the joke. After reading this book, I feel like I WAS the joke.

It's hard to say if GENERATION A is more simplistic, stodgy grumbling or sophisticated social satire. Blaming the Internet and smart-phones for shorter attention spans and decreased social intimacy feels a little old. But Douglas Coupland's polyphonic narrative, curious world-building and bizarre twist endings take this novel in interesting directions worth exploring. The book puts a new spin on the way our world has changed and the consequences of greedily --- and perhaps mindlessly --- devouring new technologies. And in a world where "social" is a prefix attached to everything now (-media, -marketing, -publishing, etc.), why are we so lonely?

In the near future, there's a new over-the-counter drug on the market called Solon, an anti-anxiety medication that eliminates a consumer's sense of time and eases them into a comforting --- and extremely isolating --- present. The world is faced with plant species dying out without the bees to pollinate them and the breakdown of social relationships everywhere as Solon users become increasingly withdrawn from society.

Five relatively young adults from around the planet (Iowa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Paris and Canada) give their accounts of socially isolating lives in a world that is theoretically ultra-conducive to socialization. Their loneliness --- more aloneness, really --- is brought out just enough to make the point, but not to interfere with Coupland's wry wit. An emotionally overwrought novel this is not. Their lives are quiet and full of desperation until they are each stung by a bee and immediately swept away by agents in biohazard suits to hidden labs to undergo endless testing. Imprisoned for weeks in rooms designed to elicit no emotional reactions (notably by the removal of media and brand names), they must ponder an even deeper isolation until they are released.

The second act of the novel portrays them trying to fit back into their lives, though their anonymity has been shattered by their newfound celebrity. Some take it better than others (the Iowan Zack is knee-deep in Playboy bunny-esque girls infatuated with him for getting stung; Harj, a Sri Lankan customer service representative for Abercrombie & Fitch is embraced by the cherubic preps he calls "Craigs" who work at the company headquarters), but all of them struggle with yet another kind of aloneness as their lives can never be what they once were, and they start to yearn for each other. Despite never meeting in their neutrality rooms, they quickly learned about each other through the prompt international media storm, and their shared experience draws them together.

They're allowed to meet when abducted once again to an island removed from civilization, forced to tell each other stories around a campfire by the scientist behind their kidnapping. He hopes that telling stories will put his subjects in the right mood to produce specific "microproteins" (don't try to unpack the sketchy neuroscience-fiction; just run with it), which have some connection with Solon and the near-extinction of bees. Through their mostly grim stories --- as telling of the anxieties and spurned desires of this age group as anything you're likely to come across --- the five learn their role in a larger conspiracy and begin to connect the dots about the world around them. The narrative here is mostly stories-within-stories and big reveals, and while it feels like Coupland is just rushing to spit out everything he wants to say, it's necessary rushing after a first act of sly allusions and only mild barbs.

Coupland's shorter witticisms make some of the best reading in GENERATION A. Zack's rant against Monsanto and the U.S.'s sickening relationship with corn --- "buttery carb dildos" as he puts it --- is delightful reading. One of Harj's offhand comments eloquently punctures one of the decade's greatest myths of our living in an equitable global village: "Could I ever be a Craig? No. A person must be born into Craigdom, with its multiple ski holidays, complex orthodontia, proper nutrition and casual, healthy view of recreational sex." The stories --- more like fables, really --- that the five tell, though brief, are penetrating probes into our modern world.

Coupland's greater themes get spottier. While his damning of 21st-century hyper-communication is relatively coherent, his metaphors feel a little confused. The role of Solon in his critique isn't as clear as it needs to be, and its relationship to technology-overloaded isolationism is too cloudy to act as a concise abstraction of a complicated issue. His rendering of our society's addiction to techno-social innovations (Twitter et al are clearly in his sights) is sharp and sobering, but his criticisms of new technologies on the whole as a devil's path that leads to complete degenerate idiocy is overly simplistic. Also, his defense of some golden age of book-reading feels hollow. For as much as our attention spans have shortened and our petulant demands for constant content whenever and however we want it have increased, there are genuine benefits in our Web 2.0-powered world (this website, for one). Coupland's argument isn't sophisticated enough for 2009. Fortunately, he fares much better at capturing the mindset of a generation: smart but innocent babes in a Garden of Eden (to paraphrase from Vonnegut's epigraph) incapable of properly analyzing their world's complexity.

But for all the novel's faults, be they intellectual or artistic, GENERATION A is a quick, funny and earnest read. Though Coupland misses the mark, its passion is infectious. And I can't criticize a smart, witty novel that doubles as an impassioned defense of reading novels too harshly.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

I read this months ago, but I just couldn't bring myself to write the review because it was the last book my friend and former roommate added to his Amazon.com Wishlist (on my recommendation) before he took his own life. The themes of this book are themes we'd discussed and were just too raw to talk about. I'm just glad that I took notes as I read.

Douglas Coupland has long been one of my favorite authors because he has a gift of looking at the problems of the generation and capturing their essence on the written page. These are problems that many people know exist but allow them to continue because of the convenience factor. One of the things my friend was often depressed about was the state of our world and his inability to change it no matter what he personally did.

Generation A is a fictitious satire on current popular culture. Specifically, it is a commentary on how separate we've all become even though we're more connected electronically. Coupland shows how people are turning into photoshopped avatars and cartoon characters rather than living out their lives as real people. In the novel, a contributing factor to this problem is a drug called Salon which makes people crave solitude and want to escape reality, time, and people. As a result of this drug, people have separated themselves even further from a reality in which the world is falling apart and in which the bees have died out.

The storyline centers around 5 people around the world who are bitten by bees when the world thinks that they're extinct. Immediately, these people are whisked off to research facilities to find out what is so special about them that they have been chosen to be bitten by an insect thought to long be dead. When these people meet, they pass the time telling stories to each other. They tell stories of royalty, cults, wordplay, superheroes, disasters, aliens, fear,devolvement of language, and seclusion. My favorite of these stories is one called "The Man Who Loved Reading and Being Alone". It's through these stories that Coupland brings about a gradual message. I've never read an author that delivers a message in a book like Coupland does. He weaves fine threads like spider webs throughout the novel that eventually come together to make a picture. But the picture is so transient and fleeting that it's like seeing a picture in a cloud and then losing it again or like staring at one of those 3D pop out images forever before seeing the image and then losing it again. But all the little ideas coalesce together in your brain and stay there forever, becoming part of your worldview.

This is a must-read for any Douglas Coupland fan or anyone who finds the asocial individualism of the internet to be an evolving problem of our current generation: Generation A.

Douglas Coupland has written some of my all-time favorite books: Microserfs, Life After God, and of course Generation X, but I'm sad to say that this follow-on isn't in the same league. The forced reference to 'The Decameron' and the weird, patronizing characterizations of post-colonial non-Anglos all fell flat. It's not exactly the power of books to change (or save) the world, as another reviewer suggests, that Coupland is examining. It's the power of stories, which here have a definite 'video' component that no one bothers to interrogate. There are germs of very interesting ideas here, the kind that Coupland unpacked in (for me) much more satisfying ways in other books. But here, they never make it to the microwave for a quick zap, let alone even half-baking with some analog heat.

I happened to pick up 'The Dream of Perpetual Motion' by Dexter Palmer at the same time as 'Gen-A,' not imagining that 1) the two had anything in common and 2) that I'd like Palmer's book so much more than Coupland's. In important ways, both books are about stories and language and their place in a world dominated by technology. Palmer's treatment is so much more satisfying. For all the hip wit and irony in Coupland's writing, there was appreciable sincerity in the earlier books of his that I'm fond of, but which is nearly completely absent here. The voices in these earlier books had strains of hope. But the voices in 'Gen-A' and their vacuous stories are hardly pollen for the post-everything world.

I found myself re reading sections so I could absorb the nuances of this book. I loved it. I found it intelligent, warm and yet alarming.