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Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Kindle Edition
On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateJune 14, 2011
- File size3633 KB
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About the Author
Douglas Coupland is the author of twelve novels, including Generation X and Microserfs, and several works of nonfiction, including Polaroids from the Dead. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
From The Washington Post
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Girlfriend in a Coma
A NovelBy Douglas CouplandHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Douglas CouplandAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061624254
Chapter One
All Ideas Are True
I'm Jared, a ghost.
On Friday, October 14, 1978, I was playing football with my high school team, the Sentinel Spartans. It was an away-game at another school, Handsworth, in North Vancouver. Early on in the game I was thrown a pass and as I turned to catch it I couldn't help noticing how clean and blue the sky was, like a freshly squeegeed window. At that point I blacked out. I apparently fumbled the pass and I have no memory of what happened afterward, but I did learn that the coaches canceled the game, which was dumb because we were cleaning up and for all anybody knew, it was probably just a severe relapse of mono from two years earlier.
But between that fumbled pass and a few hours later when I woke up in Lions Gate Hospital, I was diagnosed with leukemia--cancer of the bone marrow and hence the blood. Just three months later I died, on January 14, 1979. It was a lightning-speed progression for this particular disease. Before I died I lost all my hair and my skin turned the color of an unwashed white car. If I could do it all over again, I'd have hidden the mirrors from about Week Six onward.
My life was happy and full and short; Earth was kind to me and my bout with cancer was my Great Experience. Unless, of course, we include my sex binge with Cheryl Anderson the week her parents were renovating and the whole family moved into The Maples motel for five days. That aside, I believe that unless a person passes through some Great Experience, that person's life will have been for naught. Such an experience doesn't have to be explosive or murderous or include Cheryl Anderson; often a quiet life of loneliness can be its own Great Experience. And I will also say this: hospitals are girl magnets. My room there quickly became a veritable parade float of flowers, cookies, knit goods, and girls who had quite obviously (and fetchingly) spent hours grooming. Such is the demented nature of the universe that I was too weak to properly respond to my being hit on by carloads of Betties and Veronicas--all except for the cheeky Cheryl Anderson who gave me 'manual release' the day I lost my eyebrows, followed by a flood of tears and the snapping of Polaroids in which I wear a knit toque. Gush gush.
But back to right now--here, where I am, here at world's end.
Yes, the world is over. It's still here but it's . . . over. I'm at the end of the world. Dust in the wind. The end of the world as we know it. Just another brick in the wall. It sounds glamorous but it's not. It's dreary and quiet and the air always smells like there's a tire fire half a mile upwind.
Let me describe the real estate that remains one year after the world ended: It is above all a silent place with no engines or voices or music. Theater screens fray and unravel like overworn shirts. Endless cars and trucks and minivans sit on road shoulders harboring cargoes of rotted skeletons. Homes across the world collapse and fall inward on themselves; pianos, couches, and microwaves tumble through floors, exposing money and love notes hidden within the floorboards. Most foods and medicines have time-expired. The outer world is eroded by rain, and confused by lightning. Fires still burn, of course, and the weather now tends to extremes.
Suburban streets such as those where I grew up are dissolving inside rangy and shaggy overgrown plants; vines unfurl across roads now undriven by Camaros. Tennis rackets silently unstring inside dark dry closets. Ten million pictures fall from ten million walls; road signs blister and rust. Hungry dogs roam in packs.
To visit Earth now you would see thousands of years of grandeur and machinery all falling asleep. Cathedrals fall as readily as banks; car assembly lines as readily as supermarkets. Lightless sunken submarines lumber to the ocean's bottom to spend the next billion years collecting silt. In cities the snow sits unplowed; jukeboxes sit silent; chalkboards stand forever unerased. Computer databases lie untapped while power cables float from aluminum towers like long thin hairs.
But how did I end up here? And how long am I to stay here? To learn this, we need to learn about my friends. They were here, too--at the end of the world. This is the place my old friends came to inhabit as well--my friends who grew old while I got to remain forever young.
Question: would I do it the same way all over again? Absolutely--because I learned something along the way. Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance--after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy--you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.
So here follows the story of friends of mine who finally learned their lesson: Karen, Richard, Pam, Hamilton, Wendy, and Linus. Richard's the best talker of the group so in the beginning the story is mostly his. Karen would have been better but then Karen wasn't around Earth much in the beginning. C'est la vie. But then Richard's story only takes us so far. The story gets bigger than him. It includes them all. And in the end it becomes my story. But we'll get to that.
Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.
18-25-32 . . . Hike!
Continues...
Excerpted from Girlfriend in a Comaby Douglas Coupland Copyright © 2008 by Douglas Coupland. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B004W2ZCB4
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; 1st edition (June 14, 2011)
- Publication date : June 14, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 3633 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 292 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #745,021 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #454 in Literary Satire Fiction
- #802 in Action & Adventure Literary Fiction
- #4,572 in Magical Realism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Since 1991 Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS and Vice. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and Villa Stücke in Munich this fall. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Officer of the Order of British Columbia and is a Chevlier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres.
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What is amazing is how the story is relevant and prescient in 2022.
I have found this to be a fault in many Kindle books. Come on you guys, it's not rocket science. Read your book after it's been published as well as just before. If there are errors, unpublish, correct and republish. Having three books already published on Kindle I think I know what I'm talking about. Just type in Helen Byrne/O'Connor's Boy if you don't believe me.
Douglas Coupland has a way with words, very clever. The plotting and characterization in this book does not live up to his phrasing. It can't be easy to write a book about nihilistic characters because their very nature is dull. He succeeded in some parts, and I wouldn't say failed, but something in that family, in other parts (Well, that was a messy sentence. Apologies).
I loved the opening chapters, for that he gets a full five stars. The rest is uneven.
I'm very happy I finally got around to reading it, and I would definitely read his other books (the current ones at least).