Rating: 
Summary: A Wild Trip
Review: Coupland is one of my favorite authors. I had hesitated to read Girlfriend for a long time. The story is a bit creepy. Or so it seemed. It has all of Coupland's trademark wit, humor, crackling ideas, and insights. The characters are fairly well drawn and Richard makes a particularly warm hearted main character. Linus and Wendy too. Is it a perfect book? No. But it is original and where it is not, it winks to it's inspirations. Coupland takes chances with this book--and that is what I like about it. Does the end (and end of the world) work as well as you might hope? Not exactly, but it is hopeful. Like "Life After God" Coupland wants to look inside ourselves and consider our lives. Our world. What of it? Is it all bad? No. These characters--a ghost, a coma victim, drugged out TV people, a doctor, etc...get us to think. I applaud Coupland. He tackles similar issues in Miss Wyoming too. Wymoing is a more traditional look at these issues--love as salvation. Here, it is even bigger as we ponder faith, self-improvement, etc. So, sometimes we go to Plan B or it takes us, as Jared says, until the third time to learn. Coupland makes us THINK and may not be as profound as some reviewers might wish--but does it matter. He can touch you. Isn't that the most important thing?
Rating: 
Summary: a waste of my time
Review: this book was a complete waste of my time, the beginning was
promising,the end extremely dragging and disapponting.
i wish i would have been warned beforehand, and i dont think
that douglas coupland deserves to be among the list of writers
such as chuck palanhuik or brett easton ellis, who i believe ARE
the true genuises of this era.
Rating: 
Summary: Gen-X dribble
Review: Let us look at this clearly...Machines control our lives and emptiness fills our lives. Sure, whoop-de-doo, it take a very deep and critical thinker to see that in our modern world. I felt he oversimplified the modern day lives and events. To top it all off there is a ghost, from the main characters past, who performs miracles and a coma vicitm who sees the future with three paperbags over her head. Honestly, do I need to say anything more?
Needless, to say this book was uninspiring and uninsightful. Maybe because I dont long for the late seventies that I don't mourn the wonders of feathered haircuts and down jackets.
Instead, pick up a Milan Kundera book. Don't waste your time with an early nineties fad...gone bad.
Rating:
Summary: Where "Life After God" leaves off...
Review: I really enjoyed this story once I got past the introductory chapter. This story seems to have grown out of "Life After God", which happens to be my favorite Coupland novel. In fact, the principle characters, in many cases, bear many of the similar character traits and personalities of the principle characters in "Life After God."Moreover, the moral questions raised in this story are the same, as Coupland finds himself contrasting crass materialism with the inner longings of the spirit, raising difficult issues that face our our generation. The story is set on the West Coast, and begins with a group of teenagers who generally hang out and drift together, not quite sure what their future holds. Other Coupland fans will recognize this as another similarity to Life After God. The story then follows their search for meaning as time passes and they face various trials such as drugs, fame, broken relationships and a host of other mixed blessings. Then a great miracule takes place, bringing about a prophecy of the end times on popular television. This is where things get rather interesting. However, I won't spoil it for the reader.
Rating: 
Summary: A flawed but important moral novel
Review: I've just put this book down; the first that I've read literally from cover-to-cover in one sitting for a long while. It's flawed, of course: there certainly are moments of banality, of rather purple prose and cheesiness. And yes, as another reviewer commented, there's a lot here that is done better elsewhere. Where the novel succeeds, though, is in its vivid insight into the post-modernist mind - and soul. I can't speak for all of us, of course, but the emotions of disenchantment, of being disenfranchised, felt by the novel's characters are feelings that resonated loudly with me. There's a very precise nailing down of the maladies of modern life, and despite some other reviews it's _not_ all that preachy - there's no sense that any particular element of life is entirely "to blame", although drugs and the media feature strongly. Indeed, while there's the sense that it's mankinds evolution that has led to his devolution (as it were), there's a subtext that all of that is necessary, in some way, for true progress. And, as much as there is no specific evil, Coupland equally provides no specific solutions, except perhaps that the effort to find meaning is itself meaningful. In a world in which many of us find ourselves on the brink of some self-discovery, some self-fulfilment that we never quite reach, it's an important message. So, for all its mistakes, and its occasional clumsiness, there are some things here that should not be ignored, however often they might be stated. This is a novel on ethics as much as it is on relationships, and it asks questions of us all. And before you are tempted to denounce such questions as trite, or unnecessary, or redundant, consider for a monment our own overreliance on sarcasm ("we call it irony, nowadays"), on self-delusion, on hubris, on making excuses, on taking the easy way out. And perhaps you too might begin to wonder whether the people preaching in the streets are quite as crazy as all that...
Rating:
Summary: Coupland: Languishing behind the real players.
Review: Although I ate this novel up in but a few days, shunning the others I'm currently reading, certain aspects of Girlfriend n a Coma just did not sit right for me. The question is where to begin. Ok, it starts well, we've got a nice little gang of yankee kid pals, the boys, the gals, the charismatic one, the intelligent one, the ditzy one, and for a while there the novel is going just fine. As soon as we hit the actual coma though, Coupland slips from Entertainment mode to Preachy mode. The suspensions of disbelief we're expected to make with Coupland are a little too much, as the 17 years of Karen's coma are covered in snippets. Are we expected to believe that Richard spends these years thinking only of Karen, not finding one other girlfriend in all this time? The total convenience of having 4 of the already introduced main characters marry each other is a bit hard to swallow, not to mention the small matter of Hamilton and Pam's heroin addiction and overdose. One word: Trainspotting. Karen wakes up, and it just so happens that she is in position to comment on life in the 90's. Now it's time for Coupland to vicariously put forth his oh so original views through Karen's comments "Everything is about work; work work work" Two words: Fight Club. Soon the plague rolls around, and Jared the ghost comes back to nauseate the reader with his "miracles" and idealism. Although the group of friends in the book have by this staged reached their mid-thirties, it's difficult to picture them as being out of their teens, as they were when we were first introduced. Jared swoops in, performs a few of the cheesiest miracles ever that made me wanna retch, and then after keeping us waiting for the entire latter third of the book, delivers his Plan B. "Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud. Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs" Instead of thinking "Yes, yes, yes!!", I thought "Pulleeease" I can't quite put my finger on exactly what pissed me off about this novel, I think the way it quickly descended into nothing more than a overly complex vehicle for the author's opinions, ideals and desires made me feel used. I don't go to church anymore for this exact reason, I don't need to waste my time having someone tell me how the world should be. I find Chuck Palahniuk's method of doing so enjoyable and enlightening, but found this novel nothing more than a saccharine, convoluted morality play. Maybe I've read too many novels by excellent novelists, but everything about Girlfriend in a Coma reeks of mediocrity. If you're looking for "gritty realism", read Irvine Welsh, for enlightenment, read Chuck Palahniuk, or for a plot tackling none other than the apocaplypse, ghosts and visions read Stephen King, or even Kurt Vonnegut. In short, do not read this.
Rating: 
Summary: Weird!
Review: Starts out so strong, but the end gets weird a little preachy.
Rating:
Summary: This book really makes you think
Review: After reading this book, I re-analyzed life, the earth, and what our real purpose is on this big planet.
Rating:
Summary: the mind boggles
Review: This is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my life...and I've read Chrichton's "Timeline". Coupland doesn't just meander from one story to the next. he leaps wildly. This starts out as a charming little story about loss and the need for closure, then makes a huge leap to a story about a weird plague sweeping across the world (ala The Stand), and then makes another huge leap to some supernatural tripe about altering history by not answering your phone or some such nonsense. I don't know. By the time I got to this little deus ex machina (in the last three or four pages in the book, by the way...nice, real nice) I was just fighting to get to the end so I could say I'd finished it. [..]Coupland should have stuck with his first plot and left the other two out of it. Blyech.
Rating:
Summary: Strange and Dissapointing
Review: I really felt this story was too strange and I really didn't know enough about the characters to care about them. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
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