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 Girlfriend in a Coma
Douglas Coupland, 1998
While a well-recognized Canadian author, Douglas Coupland has a polarizing effect on some readers. I’ll be honest and admit straight up that I’m a fan, but I’m willing to take flak from readers who couldn’t make it through Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland takes us for some pretty incredible plot twists and turns to arrive at his final destination.
Girlfriend in a Coma tells the story of a group of friends in North Vancouver. It follows them as they finish high school and over the next two decades, well into their adult lives. At the outset, football-playing Jared succumbs to leukemia. He returns as a prophetic ghost in the final section of the book. Karen, the girlfriend of the book’s title, falls into a coma after mixing crash dieting with prescription drugs. The remaining characters try to figure out what to do with their lives, going on to university, careers, drug addictions, and parenthood.
As we talked about these characters – the brilliant doctor, the electrician who becomes a homeless wanderer, the drug-addicted supermodel – we realized that they’re all, for lack of a better word, losers. They all go out into life with great ambition but just can’t seem to get it together. Ultimately they end up living back with their parents or just around the corner in the North Vancouver neighbourhood they all grew up in. We realized that we all know people like this; we might even fit this description ourselves sometimes. Douglas Coupland does a great job of setting up a situation we can relate to.
And then things go awry. Seventeen years into her coma, Karen wakes up. She’s astounded to see how much – or, how little – her friends have made of their lives. Shortly after her re-entry into civilization, the world more or less comes to an end. Everyone in the world falls asleep, except for the novel’s main characters. Natural disasters ensue. Infrastructure collapses. The solitary North Vancouver survivors subsist on supermarket plunder until Jared – the aforementioned deceased classmate – reappears and tries to help them fix things. He heals their blindness and other physical afflictions and removes their drug addictions. He gives them everything they need to start a new life for themselves, but they continue to pass their time squabbling over VHS tapes looted from the local video store.
While it’s easy to get frustrated with this tunnel vision, the temptation to sink into apathy in the midst of turmoil is pretty common. We realized that the characters in this novel don’t have any kind of cause to get behind. Jared asks Karen what big changes she sees after being asleep for seventeen years. She replies that the biggest difference is “A lack…A lack of convictions—of beliefs, or wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow; no nothing. People—the people I knew—when I came back they only, well, existed.” Even when faced with a million potential causes – a million problems to fix – these people don’t know where to start. Sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture when we’re in the middle of something, and we won’t work for change unless we have a threat hanging over our head.
At this point, Jared provides a threat. These last people on earth are given a choice: they can continue as they are, with nuclear holocaust-like weather conditions and an unpredictable supply of canned tuna. Or, they can go back to the last day when the world was “normal” on one condition: it is their duty to wake everyone up to the problems in the world. Jared tells them that they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives searching for answers, asking questions, and challenging “dead and thoughtless beliefs”. He explains that “in [their] old lives [they] had nothing to live for. Now [they] do.” He commands them to “go clear the land for a new culture…if you’re not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order—then you’re wasting your day.”
The catch in all this is that, to gain a second chance and a new purpose in life, Karen will go back into her coma. To become fully awake, one of them must go back to sleep.
The solution Jared offers led us to talk about our own society’s willingness to ask questions and to get behind causes. Do we have causes today? Are we willing to get behind big issues, or is the population more complacent than it has been in past decades? Are we giving our time as volunteers because we care deeply about issues? Are we giving our time as volunteers at all? Is society today as supportive of those who choose an alternative lifestyle as a means of protesting existing norms?
People still feel a call to do something meaningful on some scale, but we often feel disconnected from the means that allow us to enact this. Douglas Coupland challenges us to ask “why” as a lifelong battle, not just for ourselves but for the future of humanity.
Book Club summary by Jennifer Hoyer
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Sunday, 05 February 2012 
