Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend In A Coma
Douglas Coupland’s novel Girlfriend in a Coma is probably the darkest of his novels that I have read. It tells the story of a group of friends growing up in Vancouver, from the late 70s until the late 90s. One of these friends, Karen, falls into a coma and awakes sixteen years later to find her friends (and her new daughter) are living surface-level, superficial, lonely lives.
This book is divided into three parts: The first part talks about the time between Karen going into her coma and her return from the coma. The second part talks about Karen’s reintegration into the world, especially regarding the relationships between her and her daughter Megan, and her and Megan’s father, Richard. The third part talks about the group’s lives after the apocolypse, an event Karen predicted weeks earlier, where the rest of the citizens of earth simply fell asleep and died.
I really like Douglas Coupland’s writing, and this book was not an exception. Though it is bleak at times, it is very funny as well, and he does an excellent job with his characterizations.
