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Mood: Happy ]
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Currently: Watching My son play with blocks ]
The original publishing Canadian wunderkind, Douglas Coupland burst onto the publishing scene with his first book, Generation X. He then produced Microserfs. He has made popularized to the point of cliche words like McJobs and Generation X. I am a fan since I first read Generation X back in the early 1990s, and have recently been making a point of reading his back catalogue. So it is with this backgstory that I turned to the book Life After God
A series of vignettes or short stories, rather than a stand alone novel, Life After God is most definitely not one of Douglas Coupland’s greatest works. It is too disjointed, and that is saying something given that Coupland seems to specialize in the disjointed narrative.
Strangely enough, it is the most disjointed part of the book that is the strongest. There Coupland gives us an end of the world, nuclear apocalypse as seen through the eyes of those who are killed by it. Each part of this section of the book describes in painful detail the melting, burning and crushing of the narrators. It is alternatively fascinating and horrifying. The one thing that was missing was emotional investment in the characters. If I had cared about these people more, their end would have had more of an impact.
And therein lies the problem with this book. The reader spends so little time with the narrators of each section that we don’t get to care about them. These characters are interesting, but we don’t spend enough time with them. I know that this was a series of novellas and short stories that Coupland put together on the advice of a publisher, but I would have liked a whole book staring some of these characters. The recently divorced father who is travelling with his child to visit a relative deserves a whole book, and maybe now that Copland is older he might be able to write it. The depressed, off-kilter, possible suicidal narrator at the end of the book (and the group of friends he skinny dipped with) also needs a chance to shine in a longer work.
This was not one of his better works and should probably only be read by completists like me or scholars and academics studying his work.