Skip to main content

Douglas Coupland's GENERATION A

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."
— Kurt Vonnegut


After many years of recommendations and the associated build-up, I’ve finally done it:  I read my first Douglas Coupland book.  Does he live up to the hype?  Well...

Generation A tells a tale of a strange and alternate Earth, one where the bees have mysteriously disappeared.  As such, some of the things that we take for granted now are gone, like flowers and apples and such. 

We are told the story from the perspectives of 5 different people around the world.  There’s Zack, a somehow model-esque redneck farmboy from Iowa.  Harj, a customer services operator based out of India for the almighty, Abercrombie & Fitch.  Samantha, a young New Zealander whose parents declared their new belief in no belief.  Diana, a young dental hygienist with a serious case of tourette syndrome from North Bay, Ontario (!).  And Julien, a university student/geek who lives to play World of Warcraft from Paris, France.

Although all of them are seemingly quite different and diverse, they are brought together after each of them gets stung by the thought-to-be extinct bees.  Who would have thought, that after getting stung by a bee, it would propel you into stardom?  But there is more to their union than meets the eye.  What is the mystery behind the bee stings?  Why in particular were these 5 people stung?

I was quite intrigued by Coupland’s style of storytelling, a good mix of drama and humour.  What made it more enjoyable was the all the pop cultural references that he throws in there.  Like, he takes a few pages to explain the Japanese anime, Battleship Yamato.  Random, but pretty awesome (it even parallels our story).  At the same time, it grounds the book in a certain generation – to ours.  Would the book speak to an audience say 30 years from now?  It’s hard to imagine, unless things like World of Warcraft are still relevant then.

Where the book lost me was in the last third.  The characters begin telling short stories, in a campfire sort of style.  It goes on and on.  To me, just when things started to get intriguing, it grinds to a halt.  I wanted to hear about the story, not necessarily the stories within the story.  I’m sure there is some message behind the sub-stories, but it just wasn’t connecting with me.

For a first Coupland read, it was good, but I wanted it to be great.  But I’m a very simple man.  I was just looking for a straight-up conventional narrative.  I’ve got Girlfriend in a Coma lying on my shelf, so I’ll give him another shot.  Until then, later geeks!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mark Waid's IRREDEEMABLE (Issues #1-7)

(Note: be warned that this review is on the spoiler heavy side, so read at your own discretion if you don't want the story spoiled.) Since I was a teenager, I always had this dream that I would become a quirky movie director and I'd make a bunch of crappy little horror movies to start with, but that my first big movie would be this anti-superhero movie. I dreamed up of an Apocalypse Now -like movie using existing Marvel superheroes where Captain America would go mad, slaughtering the innocent and go into hiding somewhere 'up the river'. There would be a detective like character (possibly superhero) that would be after him, interviewing his former teammates to find out what made the all-American hero go mad. Imagine my surprise when I started reading Irredeemable . Although not exactly the story in my dreams, it's pretty close. I started reading the series this past weekend upon the glowing review that those geeks over at iFanboy put up a few weeks ago. As far a

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3!!!!!!!!!!!! (PS4)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is Activision’s latest entry into the bestselling Call of Duty franchise.  Developed by Treyarch Studios, the Black Ops subseries of Call of Duty games has been considered by many as the best of the COD games.  Whereas Black Ops 1 and 2 were direct sequels, BO3 seems only to be a spiritual sequel to its predecessors.  There is no direct or clear continuation of story from the previous entries.  Rather it takes the ideas of mind control and manipulation, and spins off its own story. It’s a futuristic world, where humans are infused with technology (much like Robocop!) and fight alongside and against robots.  This time around, you assume the role of an unnamed soldier, who together with your partner Hendricks and a CIA agent named Rachel Kane, track down a former Black Ops commander named John Taylor as he and his former squad appears to have gone rogue destroying CIA sites around the world.  The story will take you to Singapore, Egypt and ev

The League of Denial (2013)

The topic of concussions in sports is a dialogue that’s been growing the past number of years.  Do a search on ‘concussions’ and ‘football’ and you’ll get several thousand hits on the controversy that’s surrounded the sport.  It’s a challenging topic as the research is all relatively new, and the topic itself challenges the mentality and philosophy adopted by football loving Americans.  Now, I’m not a fan of football or NFL but when I saw this book lying at the local bookstore, my interest was piqued.  Although I’m not a fan of football, those that know me know that I’m an unabashed fan of prowrestling.  Talks about concussions are also quite a hot topic even within the prowrestling sub-culture.  Earlier this year, one of the hottest wrestlers of the current era, Daniel Bryan, retired early at the age of 34 due to a history of concussion related issues.  Interestingly, he was not permitted to return to the ring due to the disapproval by WWE’s medical director – a doctor by the name