The only other Coupland I've read was Life After God (which is a basically a letter to his daughter about the risks of a world without God and finding beauty in life). I remember liking it, but obviously not enough to read anything else from his prolific life's work until now. Generation A is a book I truly couldn't put down. I read the first 200 pages in one sitting and enjoyed every delicious minute of it. As the characters are introduced, there's this pitch-perfect cadence that's masterfully upset by a random monkey-wrench fact or detail...and you just KNOW Coupland has something up his sleeve that other writers only dream of being able to do to a reader. When a writer owns me like that, I'm in love.
Generation A takes place in the near future, a future where bees haven't existed for about 6 years...or so it is thought...until 5 people in 5 different places on Earth get stung around the same time. Immediately, I wished I'd seen The Happening because I thought maybe the premise was similar, but once the scientific mayhem started to unfold, I stopped caring - I'd heard that movie wasn't very good anyway and I'm pretty sure if it is the same premise, Coupland blew M. Night out of the hive anyway. There's a lot of reverie about flowers, pollination, plants, etc. Imagine trying to make an apple strudel in a world without bees...imagine a woman in high-heels and an apron in her front yard "self pollinating" her few dying plants. It's all in there - a postmodern glimpse into what may come... Throw in a dose of a drug called Solon which makes people want to be solitary and you've got my version of a society-hell.
Harj is a call center employee in Sri Lanka who lost his family to a tsunami. Zach is a dead-beat midwestern playboy with a rich uncle, a family history of drug use and a job involving soft-core porn and corn fields. Samantha is a 30-something single woman from New Zealand who's learned to not expect much. Julien is a young student from Paris who's stopped attending classes to hate the world and play WOW. Diana is a Canadian with Tourettes, a crush on a married cult-leader and a life that, up until the sting, no one would envy. She prays a lot and loves dental hygiene.
The story is told a chapter a piece by each character, but unlike some writers, Coupland doesn't do the per-character backward story-telling - he moves the prose along magically from one voice to the next. As these dynamic and incredibly real characters meander through their worlds turned upside down by bees, science and story-telling, you know they're on the brink of something that you cannot see coming. I won't give away the end, but I consider myself a pretty good critical reader and I was shocked.
A sample: "I caught a ride home with a Mexican who made me sing mariachi songs. The bed of his truck was filled with bags of onions."
Interesting side-note, I finished this book on Thursday night and yesterday on my commute home from Orlando, I heard about this on NPR. Coupland as fortune-teller?
Sounds interesting! I've never read any of Coupland's work, but might give him a try. And The Happening really wasn't all that great-- except my boy Marky-Mark was in it, so it wasn't a total wash ;)
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