Rating: 
Summary: "GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE"
Review: "Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we'd all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there'd never be another one again?" (Coupland, 91)
Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! is a tale of loss and the infinite spirals of emotion that stem from inimitable and incomprehensible acts that serve as more than mere speed bumps on the road of life, and go on to tarnish vast quantities of people via a ripple effect. Furthermore, Coupland briefly and vaguely touches on religious themes and how religion plays a role in some people's lives. The novel is told in four parts.
The first part is told, in a Lovely-Bones-esque kind of way, by Cheryl Anway, the victim of a heinous school shooting. Cheryl glances in retrospect at the events leading up to her death, and informs of her covert marriage to Jason, her high school sweetheart, and her recently discovered pregnancy. Neither of which anyone but the two of them knew about.
Next we hear from Jason, the boyfriend who has yet to really put the past behind him and move on with his life. Jason, as would be expected, moves through life in an apathetic manner, and doesn't ever really allow himself to live, love, or forgive. Jason gives his account of the shootings, as well as what happened shortly thereafter, encompassing his own feelings and his family's disintegration.
Third we hear from Jason's eventual girlfriend, Heather, who comes along after the previous insert from Jason. She talks of her relationship with Jason, and of her own recent loss.
Finally, Reg, Jason's sanctimonious father whom everyone loves to hate yet can't help but feel sorry for, writes a heart-wrenching letter to Jason. In this letter he divulges his insecurity with his faith, and attempts to make amends for parental misgivings.
After reading this novel, you will find yourself chewing up various emotions and spitting them back out only to find a bitter-sweet reminiscence left in your mouth. Though that may sound at first like a bad thing, it only attests to Coupland's ability to really drive his points home and, in so doing, force his readers to experience a novel rather than simply read it. Hey Nostradamus! is a dissection of raw, brutal, human emotion, told in the intriguingly vivid and witty manner characteristic of Coupland's other works. I have loved everything I have read by him thus far, and will definitely continue to support his work. Very highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Good characterization drives novel
Review: "Hey Nostradamus!" has an atypical structure, each of its four chapters being narrated in first person by a different character. The first part of the story is told from the point of view of a victim of a high school massacre that is obviously patterned after the Columbine incident. Her recounting of that violent day sets the pace for the rest of the book, as the subsequent characters are, in turn, effected by its events. Each of them is lead, at some point, to question his or her religious convictions - some are strengthened and others are lost.By the time the novel reaches its fourth segment, it has morphed into a completely different tale than what is expected from the beginning. The transitions can be jarring, but then, so can life itself. I found myself sympathizing with each character as he or she took hold of the story, despite the fact that they were each capable of some pretty horrible or foolish acts. The moral flaws of the individual characters don't seem to matter though. It's the rest of the world that's a mess, and they're just trying to get through it.
Rating: 
Summary: Ventriloquism about Vice and Virtue
Review: "Hey Nostradamus" is a book about the aftermath -- and to a certain extent the
prelude -- of a high school massacre in which 3 teenage malcontents
kill lots of students until they are stopped by Jason, the boy-friend
(and secretly the teen-husband) of one of the murdered teens. jason kills
one of the mudereders. Another is then killed by the crowd of teens;
the first had quailed after the first round of slaughter, so his two
accomplices had killed him. The saviour is then falsely accused of having been an accomplice, and though soon exonerated legally, remains under the
cloud of suspicion for the rest of his troubled, alcoholic life. The story
is told through four voices -- that of the teen-bride, Cheryl, Jason, Jason's
later partner Heather, and Jason's father Reg. But all 4 voices are one,
and I suspect this is not entirely intentional (because there are signs
-- unsuccessful -- of trying to give them distinct flavors), although
the book's moral is that we are all sinners as well as victims, no one
worse than the other, if you look close enough. God is on trial here,
in a variety of flavors of spirituality and anti-spirituality. There is
an attempt at a redemptive message -- mainly via the father, Reg, by far
the least credible character, who is portrayed first as a despotic and
destructive moralitarian, greeting his son's heroism, with the accusation
of having become a murderer. (He does not mean the accomplice theory! He
means Jason killed somebody; so he had homicide in his heart!) Reg, we
are to believe, eventually admits to himself that he was a religious
fraud of some sort, and he becomes human as just about all the other
dramatis personae self-destruct. Actually, there are no other dramatis
personae: they are each just variants of Jason's -- probably the author's
-- perplexity about human suffering and frailty. No real resolution
here, just some moments that succeed in evoking the human condition --
and others that fail. I have not read anything else by Douglas Coupland, but
I suspect that his sense of humor and his keen ear for trends would be better
trained on a less morbid theme, because he does not really seem to have
any new light to shed on this one. -- Istvan Hesslein
Rating:
Summary: Good characterization drives novel
Review: "Hey Nostradamus!" has an atypical structure, each of its four chapters being narrated in first person by a different character. The first part of the story is told from the point of view of a victim of a high school massacre that is obviously patterned after the Columbine incident. Her recounting of that violent day sets the pace for the rest of the book, as the subsequent characters are, in turn, effected by its events. Each of them is lead, at some point, to question his or her religious convictions - some are strengthened and others are lost. By the time the novel reaches its fourth segment, it has morphed into a completely different tale than what is expected from the beginning. The transitions can be jarring, but then, so can life itself. I found myself sympathizing with each character as he or she took hold of the story, despite the fact that they were each capable of some pretty horrible or foolish acts. The moral flaws of the individual characters don't seem to matter though. It's the rest of the world that's a mess, and they're just trying to get through it.
Rating: 
Summary: If you love Coupland, you will enjoy this book
Review: But for those less passionate about his unique style, I would probably borrow, not buy this book. I agree with the Amazon.ca review which say that the first 1/3rd of the book is mesmerizing. In fact, it's momentum kept me reading through to the end. By the time I put it down, I found myself feeling sad, touched, and yet again impressed by Coupland's ability to capture characters who, despite their crazy circumstances, feel real.
Rating:
Summary: The Lives Which Are Affected
Review: Columbine. That's the biggest step you can take to understanding this novel. In the same way that Microserfs, Coupland's best in my opinion, was "about" microsoft and the dot.com era, this book is about the killings in columbine, co. More than that, though, it concerns how traumatic events affect the people who surround them. Doug likes to write in first person, and this book is a good vehicle for that; it concerns the lives of four people: Cheryl; a girl killed in the shootings, her boyfriend Jason, who is the damaged survivor, and Heather, the "new girlfriend"- 20 years later- who still has to live up to the now-a-saintly-martyr Cheryl, and Jason's father Reg, the fractured family's patriarch-of sorts. This all sounds very depressing. However, if you've read Coupland before, you'll know of his ability to turn these traumas into transcendent, illuminating moments of clarity, which he does in this book better than he has in years, since "Life After God". Don't read this book for it's "view" of columbine. Instead, read to learn to appreciate the lives of the people around you. Read it to savor the mulchy descriptions of the pacific northwest. Not to fear death but to treasure life. That sounds pretty pithy... Just give it a try.
Rating:
Summary: possibly Coupland's best
Review: Coupland continues to impress me with his work, and I think this is quite possibly his best novel to date (I consider Girlfriend in a Coma the other contender). It evokes some of the same emotions as All Families Are Psychotic, but without the implausible absurdities that occur in that story. It all falls together in the end in some somewhat unexpected, but quite realistic ways--not so much in story as in character development. This book is told in first person from the perspectives of four major characters, from 1988 to 2003, beginning with Cheryl, who is killed in a Columbine-style high school cafeteria massacre, then moving on to her boyfriend Jason, eleven years later. Jason's character is the most richly developed, and his section of the book accounts for over 100 pages of the book's 244, though the characters of previous chapters continue to echo through the later ones. I very highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: possibly Coupland's best
Review: Coupland continues to impress me with his work, and I think this is quite possibly his best novel to date (I consider Girlfriend in a Coma the other contender). It evokes some of the same emotions as All Families Are Psychotic, but without the implausible absurdities that occur in that story. It all falls together in the end in some somewhat unexpected, but quite realistic ways--not so much in story as in character development. This book is told in first person from the perspectives of four major characters, from 1988 to 2003, beginning with Cheryl, who is killed in a Columbine-style high school cafeteria massacre, then moving on to her boyfriend Jason, eleven years later. Jason's character is the most richly developed, and his section of the book accounts for over 100 pages of the book's 244, though the characters of previous chapters continue to echo through the later ones. I very highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A strong story, in Coupland's inimitable style
Review: Coupland has once again produced a strong story, with an element of the surreal creeping in. Whereas "All Families are Psychotic" had a number of surreal strands that rendered the required the reader to suspend their normal perspective, the worrying aspect of "Hey Nostradamus!" is that the principle surreal element is a school shooting that is, in fact, all too plausible. One aspect of the shooting is recounted from a victim's perspective (and from the perspective of immediately after the event), whereas the other story strands are taken from the vantage of several years after the event. The chain reactions from this are elegantly woven together - the husband of the victim who can not come to terms with the event, his relationship to his father and how that develops as a consequence of the tragedy, how his family interacts with his father. As with most of Coupland's later works, this story evolves through the different perspectives, rather than follows a rigid plot and time line. As either an introduction to those who have not read Coupland before, of for established fans, this is a volume that is well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: "God doesn't issue moral credit cards"
Review: Coupland's eighth novel Hey Nostradamus! opens with the Columbine-esque massacre of students in a Vancouver high school in 1988. It is an event related to us through the beautifully woven-together narrative fragments of Cheryl Anway who we soon realise is herself a victim of the tragedy. Cheryl has recently secretly married her boyfriend Jason Klaasen in Las Vegas, and that morning discovers she is pregnant with his baby. What follows are three further narratives covering the thirty years which take us from the eighties to the present day. We see Jason 12 years on, still clearly unable to come to terms with Cheryl's death and having taken on a hermit-like existence; then Heather, Jason's new girlfriend struggling to deal with his disappearance; and finally Reg, Jason's fanatically religious father whose coda brings us to the present day. Many inches have been dedicated to discussing the relevance of Columbine to this text and as a result the novel has been criticised for failing to address the psychology of the teenagers who commit the crime. But this is no exploration of Columbine and shouldn't be read as one. What interests Coupland is not so much the event of the shooting itself but rather the results which it produces. A series of seismic circles pulsating outwards until we reach the here and now. The first two words of the novel tell us what Coupland is really doing here and they are Cheryl's words 'I believe'. Coupland sets the shooting in 1988 for a good reason, and that is to distance it, historicize it almost; to use it as a genesis point for his real theme, which is belief in all the multifarious incarnations in which it exists within our society. Each of the four main characters that share the narrative unevenly between them, are shown dealing with a collapse of the system of belief which has maintained them. These systems range from Reg's evangelical fanaticism, through the bitchy, disloyal Youth Alive! Christian group of which Jason and Cheryl are a part; to the more dubious emotional dependence which Heather develops for the utterances of a psychic, when Jason disappears. Just as the soothsaying's of Nostradamus have helped society to post-rationalise the terrible events which happen on our planet everyday ( most memorably of course in the prophecy of the 'two twin brothers torn apart by chaos' which was beamed around the globe by email after September 11th) so too do these characters twist and manipulate religious or pagan beliefs to protect themselves. It is an hypocrisy summed up most aptly by Cheryl when she states 'I did want Jason, but, as I've said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God's terms,...I'm not sure if I used God or he used me." There are flaws in Coupland's text; the sub-plot in which Jason becomes involved is confusing and adds little to the development of the story, and certainly confuses the ending in a way that is less enigmatic, more frustrating. However, if you can get beyond reading this as a meditation upon Columbine, you will find a great deal of interest and reward in this text, and a realisation that the issues it is addressing are far more pertinant and universal than it could be given credit for.
|
