Girlfriend in a Coma [Paperback]

Douglas Coupland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1999

After making love for the first time, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil confides to her boyfriend Richard of the dark visions she's been recently suffering. It's only a few hours later on that snowy Friday night in 1979 that she descends into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard, the protagonist of this disturbingly funny novel.

Karen remains comatose for the next seventeen years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades; passing through careers as models, film special effects technicians, doctors, and demolition experts, before finally being reunited on a conspiracy–driven supernatural television series.

Upon Karen's reawakening, life grows as surreal as their television show. With apocalyptic events occurring, Karen, Richard, and their friends explore the essential mysteries of life, faith, decency, and existence. Amid the world's rubble they attempt to restore their own humanity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X--who is himself now a dangerously mature 36--boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon--lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well--for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment--which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle--dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn--which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

A high school senior makes love on a ski slope, then mixes drinks and drugs at a wild party and falls into a 17-year coma. She wakes up to find she has a daughter, delivered nine months into her coma. Her friends all seem diminished by the passage of time. Her boyfriend laments, "What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?" Not long after, a plague kills off everyone on Earth but her friends. Even more bizarre happenings follow, leading to an unconvincing denouement. For the most part, however, Coupland (Generation X, LJ 10/1/91) has crafted a moving chronicle of the impoverished inner lives of a circle of materially rich young adults of the Nineties. Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in terms of what it consumes and not what it could achieve.?David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (February 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060987324
• ISBN-13: 978-0060987329
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (180 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,366,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dare to Think Deeply, August 11, 2002

By 

paisleymonsoon (Tulsa, Oklahoma) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Girlfriend in a Coma (Paperback)

A woman comes out of a coma after almost 20 years to discover that the world has changed for the worse and her friends have barely changed. All the newest inventions have left people with less and less time and made everyone shallower and shallower. She predicts that, 3 days after Christmas, the end of the world will come and only herself and her slacker friends will be left. The question is, can they learn from being the only people left in the world or will they continue to be slackers. I have never been swept into a book in such a way; I found my dreams getting tangled up in this book at night. But it's fitting, since it seems that much of the book takes place in the realm of dreams. I love the mandate given to the characters at the end of the book to go out and ask questions and make people think. Without asking questions about how we got to where we are, the purpose of it all, and where we are going, the world stagnates. The author touches on my own feeling that technology is actually causing many people to stagnate. You can tell this if you've ever been in an internet chat room and have tried to procure any intellectual conversation from anyone. Great book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So close, and yet..., September 10, 2008

By 

This Guy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Girlfriend in a Coma (Paperback)

I really, really wanted to like this book...and it came so close to winning me over. Unfortuantely, the last quarter of the book falls apart so quickly and so badly, that it ruins whatever good experience I had with the first three quarters.

The story is really interesting, and a quick read, throughout most of the book. Then, once the Supernatural Twist occurs, it just goes downhill. From there, Coupland spends FOREVER getting to the end, and he just rambles for several chapters until he gets to the letdown that is the ending. That letdown could've come about five chapters earlier, too, since one of the characters actually warns of it...again and again and again. "I've got something to tell these people", is what he essentially says, then spends five chapters getting around to saying it.

...And, when this "bombshell" is dropped, it's boring. Plenty of people on this site have given the ending away, so I won't do that. Suffice to say, it's simplistic, it's preachy, and it isn't remotely groundbreaking. In fact, it isn't even interesting. It's just pretentious, which is a shame because so much of the book was so interesting.

I really wanted to like this book, but it just spirals out of control near the end. It seemed thrown together, and ruined a book that would've easily gotten three or four stars from me had it not lost itself in the final act.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I find your lack of faith disturbing., January 19, 2007

By 

Jose Jones - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Girlfriend in a Coma (Paperback)

Having now read "Life After God," "Microserfs" and "Girlfriend in a Coma" back-to-back-to-back, it's obvious that Coupland had a mortal terror of the emptiness and faithlessness of the '90s culture. This is the scariest, creepiest and oddest display of that fear.

The novel starts off in the late '70s when 17-year-old Karen loses her virginity on a skiing trip to boyfriend Richard and soon falls into a coma. Richard already lost one young friend to cancer (a jock named Jared, who acts as our narrator in the beginning and end of the book) and his girlfriend's tragic disappearing act is something he never truly gets over. The first section of the book shows us Richard and his friends -- sarcastic Hamilton, model Pam, lonely Wendy, smart but aloof Linus -- numbly trek into adulthood. They battle addictions, they question life, they marry -- and they all end up back in their old Canadian neighborhood.

Karen awakes two decades later to a world she finds disturbing -- empty, mindless worker drones simply existing. No free time, no fun, no leisure. While technology has grown stronger, she feels like the world has become emotionally cold and disconnected.

The frail, emaciated Karen reenters the life of her friends -- she gets to meet her daughter for the first time (she was impregnated by Richard on that night) -- and she also has visions of a coming apocalypse.

The apocalypse eventually arrives. The world "goes to sleep" -- people around the world simply pass out and die wherever they are. The aftermath is a world gone quiet. Streets filled with rotting corpses. Animals running wild in the street. The stink of death everywhere. Coupland has never been better than when he describes the horror of this plague. I think it may be the best writing he's ever done.

The friends and Megan (Richard and Karen's daughter) are the last people left on earth. Like all humans, they adapt to their situation. They watch videos and eat canned food.

At this point the three sections are like references to Stephen King -- "The Body" (a.k.a. "Stand by Me"), "It," and "The Stand."

Then things get "It's a Wonderful Life" as Jared rejoins the picture.

But the book goes deeper than that. In fact, before Coupland brings on his metaphor for our lack of beliefs and emotional remoteness, his book is quite sharp and effective in rendering the lives of his characters. Unlike in his previous novel, "Microserfs," where I often found it hard to identify with his characters, here I felt like I knew each one intimately. Some of their more cliche drug and drinking addictions are the point. Sometimes we're so lonely or angry or bitter that we don't know what to do but go to the cliche of drinking and drugs.

As horrifyingly real as the apocalypse is -- you can practically smell it -- I think Coupland's judgement is a wee too harsh. I think too much faith is just as bad as no faith at all. And I think religion (which is Coupland's major concern, it would seem) can be used too much to cover the reality of your problems.

Maybe my reaction is a bit of a "I resemble that condemnation" defense, but I don't think Coupland had to take the novel so far off the tracks, and I'm not really crazy about where the whole thing ends up (though the tone of the last section -- which is loose and blase -- will have you laughing).

But all flaws aside, this is an original, entertaining and powerful novel from a very talented author.