Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #257153 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-01
• Released on: 1999-02-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
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.

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.

The Washington Post
"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the monitory and fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut."

Customer Reviews

I find your lack of faith disturbing.
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.

unusual commentary on the meaning of life
On December 15th 1979, on the night after they first make love, Richard's girlfriend Karen goes into a coma. She wakes up 20 years later, mentally undamaged, to find her friends relatively unchanged (they seem t have just grown into their own expectations of themselves) and that she and Richard have a teenage daughter.
And just as she starts to recover, the rest of the world falls apart.

Yes, you do have to suspend disbelief, but it's worth it.

This is an unusual, original book with a unique storyline and an interesting (if somewhat clichéd) cast of characters who are searching for their meaning of life.

A Story about Friends, Love and the End of the World
This Stephen Kingesque story follows a group of friends who live on Rabbit Street in Vancouver, BC as they grow from their senior year in high school to their mid-thirties. Jarrod, or rather his ghost, narrates the first chapter. He was the jock, the football player who balled all the hot chicks, then one day he falls sick, shortly after he dies of leukemia. He was sixteen. The following year, Richard and Karen are on the slopes. The live next door to each other, have been friends since they were children and Karen wants Richard, wants to lose her virginity this night, right now, in the dark, in the snow.

Afterwards, she gives him a letter to give back to her tomorrow, unless for some reason, he can't, then he's to read it. Later they meet up with other friends from their street, Hamilton, the guy who always looks for the easy way, Pam the girl who will become a famous model and cover girl, Wendy who will become a doctor. They're supposed to go to a party where they're going to meet the last member of their troupe, Linus who will become an electrician before he becomes a seeker.

Karen who has been dieting like there is no tomorrow, because she wants to get into a size five bathing for her upcoming Hawaiian vacation, takes two Valium before drinking two week drinks. Then she falls into a coma. In the hospital Richard reads the letter. She predicted her coma and asks Richard to wait for her. And he does, for seventeen years. Even though she's pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl, Karen remains in the coma.

When she comes to she's thirty-four, frail, but lucid. She predicts the end of the world as we know it. And then everybody on the planet, except her five friends from the block and her daughter, who is now seventeen, dies.

And if that's not enough to suck you in, I don't know what is. Mr. Coupland's writing is lyrical, magical and captivating. His message is frightening, even though he gives his characters hope. This is a must read. I don't know why it took me so long to find it.