Rating: 
Summary: The context of my own youth, disturbingly so.
Review: The peculiar thing about this novel, for me, is that it describes almost exactly the context of my youth. It is a mirror to my own cultural milieu. Like their creator, Coupland's protagonists are middle-class West Van kids, grad '80; I was a west side kid, grad '82 (using our old nomenclature). Our life-trajectories are not necessarily similar, but they share the same point of origin. Therefore my reading will differ from that of most other critics. Part of the fun is in the details - the suburban geography of the North Shore, the music, the clothes, the cars, the hairstyles, the knick-knacks. (Somewhere in my in-law's house there still hangs a macramé owl.) Part of the fun is the location - a post-apocalyptic shopping spree takes place a mile up the hill from my office. I can visualize these scenes perfectly. Also fun is the little game of finding Smith's lyrics and song titles buried in the text, the author's tribute to a year spent in a deep funk listening to British mope-rock. There are strange errors in the book. They are tiny details, yet so obvious to a person who's lived here that one wonders if perhaps he didn't insert them deliberately, a little in-joke for the locals, subtle recognition that his work is so firmly grounded in this place. The train that roars through the tunnel is not the Pacific Great Western, but either BC Rail or the Pacific Great Eastern, depending on when the name change occurred. The scene on Grouse Mountain, in the second chapter, clearly takes place on the Cut chairlift, not the Blueberry chairlift. Velcro exists in 1979. There are others. They are small, but in some strange way I suspect they carry significance. I'm not sure how I feel about the conclusion. It strikes me as the product of someone writing himself out of depression. It's not a happy ending, exact! ly, but it's optimistic. I suppose I'm not quite at the point where I need to find meaning and hope in the world. The rest of the book was certainly enjoyable. I've always been fascinated by tales of apocalyptic destruction, where only a handful of survivors are left to struggle in a deserted, decaying world. (I attribute this fascination to my viewing, as a young child, a movie in which the Earth's only inhabitants are evil zombies and Charlton Heston, armed to the teeth, defending his Second Amendment rights or something. My recollection of this is quite imperfect, however.) Again, I have a difficult time making an objective assessment of Coupland's work because our world-views are sometimes eerily similar. I experience moments of disturbing self-recognition. Scott Anderson
Rating: 
Summary: bold new step; dark, but still has his trademark style
Review: I think this is the only book Douglas Coupland could have possibly written to usher in the new millenium. He will probably prove me wrong, however, and provide us all with more novels, short stories, and essays to enjoy well before 2000. In the meantime, however, Coupland has again hit the mark with GiaC. This book remains true to the humorous yet reflective style he has honed over the course of his first five books, while introducing impressive and haunting new moods. Having read his other work, I recognized many token Coupland elements which I've come to expect and relish in his work: the sympathetic narrator, the cute and knowing pop-culture references; the rich description, glib dialogue, and uncanny metaphor (the list goes on). But the book also presented me with an equal amount of unexpected elements. After setting up, in its first third, a colorful yet relatively normal portrait of late-teen fun and drama, the book veers off into surreal, mind-bending, and at sometimes downright terrifying realms. Perhaps what makes this trajectory even more effective is that all through the story's supernaturality and apocalypse, he remains focused on the very human characters he's created. The middle of the book - I don't want to spoil it, so I'll call it the "Great Change" section - is particularly gripping. The story does get a little ponderous and even sappy at the end, but I can forgive it this since Coupland was clearly trying to impart a very urgent social message, one which every reader, even if they don't like the story, will definitely be ruminating upon long after they close the book. - JP Mohan.
Rating:
Summary: The Best.
Review: This is one of those books that I pick up in the bookstore out of curiosity and read cover to cover in the following two hours without leaving the "New Releases Section." And then, having read it once, I buy it, so I can read it again--and lend it to my friends. It is dark, tender, uplifting, moralistic, subtle, beautiful. I read it and I am alternately depressed about my own life and convinced that I ought to celebrate both where I have been and where I am going--not to mention, most of all, where I am. It is not a pessimistic book. It is simply a call to action. A call to awakefulness. Read this book. And be ready to make changes afterward. It's like an invitation to make a thousand New Year's Resolutions.
Rating: 
Summary: ******************WHATEVER!!!!!!!!!!********************
Review: Girlfriend in a coma is really good at the beginning, but as for the end was just plain weird. I thought from reading the first 150 pages this was a book about love, relationships, commitment and romance, but just 50 pages further got into some really weird stuff on how Karen, the girl in the coma is the center of a "mass transformation" and the she knows about it. It has to do with a disease that random people get by sleeping, it really doesn't make any sense. I was really enjoying the book for the first 175 pages, but I just got lost at the end and don't really understand what this sudden coma/disease/mass transformation came from.
Rating:
Summary: Coupland Shows Heart
Review: Yes, it's true. No longer the cool, detached observer of our pop-obsessed times, Douglas Coupland, in Girlfriend In A Coma, has given us a passionate indictment of mindless consumerism. Along the way, he gives us some deeper characterizations than his usual glib, one-liner-spouting media-fed youth. Of course, this is not to say that he's abandoned the "zeitgeist" altogether and written a Les Miserables. His trademark pop-referential style, as well as his humor, is in abundant supply here. It just feels like he's aiming for something deeper. I devoured this book in about 5 hours or so, initially intrigued by the romance between Richard and Karen (a sly nod to the Carpenters?) and then propelled onward by the sense of impending doom that Coupland evokes so well among Karen's group of friends. I can understand how the apocalyptic climax might strike some as corny, silly, and even unneccessary, but I loved it. Apparently, Coupland wrote this book during one of the worst periods of his life. Perhaps his nervous breakdown was his "Great Experience." Whatever the inspiration, Coupland shows us that no matter how dead our souls may be, hope springs eternal.
Rating:
Summary: "If you must write ... the words you use should be your own"
Review: "... You claim these words as your own. But I've read well and I've heard them said a hundred times maybe less maybe more. If you must write prose and poems the words should be your own. Don't plagerize or take on loan." from Cemetery Gates by the Smiths. In Coupland's, Girlfriend in a Coma, I found ten sentences "lifted" from Smiths lyrics without any credit being given to the band. Does that merit the term plagerism or is it just good use of a running gag? The title Girfriend in a Coma comes from the song of the same name. "Big-mouth strikes again." (pg 10) a Smiths title. "[We'll] go to a place where it's quiet and dry and talk about precious things." (pgs 37-8) from The Queen is Dead. "... that joke isn't funny anymore." (pg 44) another title. "Hand in glove." (pg 125) yet another title. "Has the world changed or have I changed?" (pg 128) from The Queen is Dead. "The Queen is Dead." (pg198). "Everyday is like Sunday" (pg 231) a Morrissey song. "... the Last of the Famous International Playboys." (pg 263) a Morrissey title. "Golden lights oscillate (sp) wildly." (somewhere in the last chapters) a Morrissey title and a Smiths title sandwiched together. I thought that GiaC read as a Where's Waldo on 120 Minutes. I read the book in marathon stretches trying to fish out the bits of the Smiths that were floating through the text. GiaC travels down much the same road as Life after God. We still live in a generation without religion where we have goals, but lack the dreams to get us there. Coupland captures ... yet, again ... the essence of our generation. And, he does this with a voice true to the characters and to the times. If they ever make a movie the soundtrack should be pretty obvious.
Rating:
Summary: Narcosis, Reading "Girlfreind in a Coma"
Review: Coupland's "Girlfriend in A Coma" is extra-ordinary. I don't really know how he does it, but Doug has got all these tiny details that belong directly to my life. "my favorite song, Bizarre Love Triangle, playing on the clock radio." Your favorite song Doug? Your favorite song? How about mine? Doug, how do you do it? Last year, I applied for a job at Microsoft. Then I discovered Doug Coupland's Microserfs, the one about the tekkie geeks who worked for Microsoft. Something I almost became. "Polaroids from the Dead" had a whole series of Washington D.C. skenna, and accounts of Grateful Dead concerts. Both of these are very familiar to me. I remember my own Grateful Dead concert, ages ago... Doug how do you manage to keep such close tabs on my life? Are you inside my head? "Girlfriend in a Coma"? Song titles embedded all over the text. Songs from my days: "That joke isn't funny anymore." "Hand in glove." "Half a person." "Bigmouth strikes again." "The last of the famous international playboys." "The Queen is dead" "The end of the world as we know it" "Golden lights." "Oscillate wildly." "Everyday is like Sunday." And others that are not even not hidden: "Girlfriend in a Coma," blaring across the cover page. I wonder how Morrissey feels. I have already mentioned Bizarre Love Triangle and Blue Monday. There are references to Blondie, the Buzzcocks, and to "that Smiths song" I have just finished reading Girlfriend in a Coma. And it is an experience, the kind of taste that I used to get from reading Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick, only more intense. It makes me contemplate my life. Me, now officically tired of vainly wishing to order chaos into meaning. Fatigued of conjuring up impossible escape sequences. Still trying? Yes & No. Tired of thinking about what it was that was lost. I never feel like I ever had it. The joy of life persists some! how, in the variety that the narrowness of my own lifestyle. "I have never lost the sensation of always being on the brink of some magic revelation" [Coupland, Life After God]. What does this all mean? It means. It just means. There are too many coincidences between our own lives and "Girlfriend in A Coma." Coupland: "a day of profound omens and endless coincidences, but with no guidebooks to help in discerning a higher meaning. Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence" [Girlfriend in a Coma 100]. Chewing Doug Coupland? At the turning point of my own life? As always and never. My friend OGLé crunched up "Girlfriend in A Coma" in just under a day. His reactions were similar to mine. Though we were both electrified by the book, we found some of it a bit off the wall, even deranging. The slightly moralistic last section was very similar to the ending of "Life after God." I loved "Girlfriend in A Coma," I mean it even made me cry. However the "You just haven't earned yet baby. So have another go at it, try it again son" mentality was just a bit too "moral" for my taste. The same goes for the presence of Jared-the-Healing-Ghost. Plus, the overall surrealism was simply bizarre. Nothing to be expected from a Coupland novel--mind you, I am not saying that it is bad. Our local team of experts [made up of OGLé and yours truly Ci] think that, while still being very Couplandian in essence, the treatment of the subject matter is a deranged vision à la Philip K. Dick. The post-Apocalyptic-hell taste that runs througout the last section is very much in the style of any decent J. G. Ballard novel. OGLé also added that amidst all of the Smiths song references, he was waiting for a Couplandian CNN report talking about "Panic in the streets in London." Which never materialized. [I cannot believe that you missed out on this one Dou! g.] Still, "Girlfriend in A Coma" is an excellent book about about the desert of meaning, about the apocalypse, about pregnancy. About Gen-X Messiah-hood and vacuum. In a way, it is another holywood disaster movie. Very sinistre, a true "Signe des temps" and "Pre-Millenium Tension" work, if I may quote my friend Monartian and the hipster musician Tricky. By the way, Murat Onart thanks again for this wonderful gift you sent. Ci Celikyay
Rating:
Summary: The prophet of the 30 something generation
Review: After reading the 'other' books by Coupland it is impossible to say he's only got talent. He is a writer that will, hopefully, be here in the next years to help us see how we really are. Coupland started with Shampoo Planet and Generation X and made us believe he was only a bright kid who wrote about his fellow kids, saw the birth of the net generation, the crisis of yuppies and the birth of techies who highly valued not only technology but also feelings, relations and, behold, family (Microserfs). Now he is the speaker of a generation approaching the age of 40, with no more values, no energy, nothing to believe in, except maybe, and still, friendship. His analysis of what we are couldn't be better. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Coupland attempts a call to arms...
Review: Having just put down Microserfs before I started this, I can say GIAC is very different, not as easy a read. Much more of a fable, it seems his attempt to really rouse his readers rather than just leaving us sitting in our comfy chairs saying "wow, I am as empty as those characters." So read it, think about it, and listen to its message.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Start, but Dull Ending.
Review: The first part of the book is excellent fiction writing and kept me entralled, but towards the end of the book Coupland becomes too obsessed with his philosophies and fails to maintain his characters' credibility. Are we really to believe that the average person would be willing to act like a looney street person all in the name of meaningfulness? It's reminicent of cult behavior to me.
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