LOM Article on Coupland

Here's the pretty lame short review I wrote for my church newsletter; but seriously, read Coupland.

Douglas Coupland is best known for giving my generation a label--characteristically ironic--describing us as a generation that “doesn’t have a name—an X generation—purposefully hiding itself.” In that first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), Coupland established himself, not only as one of my generation’s most defining voices, but as an important representative of one Gen. X’s most defining characteristics: the religionless spiritual quest.
He developed this idea much more explicitly in his 1994 book, Life After God, in which he describes my generation as the first generation to grow up “after God,” by which he means, we were the first (and. in retrospect, the last?) generation to grow up in a world in which God was not considered relevant. He claims, especially, I think, for those of us growing up in western North America, our life was “the life of children of the children of the pioneers—life after God—a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven.” But he has doubts about how ideal our life has really been. He suspects “there was a trade-off somewhere” and the “price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched” and he wonders “if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.” But then he says he must remind himself that “we have religious impulses—we must—and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?”
One can read all of Coupland’s writing as a persistant exploration of these cracks, but his most explicit exploration of them to date is in his 2003 novel, Hey Nostradamus. Though I’m a die-hard Coupland fan, I’ve only recently read this remarkably sensitive exploration of religion, violence, and sorrow. In a historical situation in which religion seems to be dividing us more than ever, Coupland’s novel offers us more than clichéd pleas for tolerance. He gives us insight into the role religion plays in people’s lives, considering how it both helps and hinders personal transformation.
Early on, one of the characters announces Coupland’s theme: “to acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.” He pursues this theme as four very different characters reflect on their involvement in a Columbine-style-schoolhouse-massacre set in 1988. Using this violent episode as a launching pad, he attempts to understand how time and sorrow change all of us. But these changes do not occur in simplistic or stereotypical ways, and religion, though the driving force in these transformations, does not remain static, but changes with them.
Coupland’s hip, ironic, pulp-culture-laden voice is still present in this novel, so those of you put off by ubiquitous references to cultural artifacts like “twenty-ounce Aladdin souvenir plastic drinking cups” and similes that require an at-least-cursory familiarity with sit-coms, or who can’t seem to feel nostaligic for Windows 95 and Moebis strips, may be put off a little by his style. But I think most readers will find this is an easy, but engaging read.
Ultimately, I hope some of you will read it this month because Hey Nostradamus is a resurrection a story. Coupland quotes a prominent Christian resurrection text in the frontspiece: “Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed . . .” (I Corinthians 15:51-52). It is this mystery of life and change in the face of death and sorrow that we pursue during the Easter season, and so I invite you to consider reading this novel and reflecting on how your own losses have opened up new insights into this mystery of human change.