Generation A is set in the near future in a world where bees are extinct, until five unconnected people from around the world -- in the United States, Canada, France, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka -- are all stung. Their shared experience unites them in ways they never could have imagined.
Generation A mirrors Coupland's debut novel, 1991's Generation X. It explores new ways of storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland'swriting, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. Imaginative, inventive, and fantastically entertaining, Generation A is his most ambitious work to date.
HARJTRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA
How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Imagine a tropical sky, ten miles high and a thousand years off on the horizon. Imagine air that feels like honey on your forehead; imagine air that comes out of your lungs cooler than when it entered.
Imagine hearing a dry hiss outside your office building's window. Imagine walking to the window's louvered shutters and looking out and seeing the entire contents of the world you know flow past you in a surprisingly soothing, quiet sluice of gray mud: palm fronds, donkeys, the local Fanta bottler's Jeep, unlocked bicycles, dead dogs, beer crates, shrimper's skiffs, barbed wire fences, garbage, ginger flowers, oil sheds, Mercedes tour buses, chicken delivery vans.
...corpses
...plywood sheets
...dolphins
...a moped
...a tennis net
...laundry baskets
...a baby
...baseball caps
...more dead dogs
...corrugated zinc
Imagine a space alien is standing with you there in the room as you read these words. What do you say to him? Her? It? What was once alive is now dead. Would aliens even know the difference between life and death? Perhaps aliens experience something else just as unexpected as life. And what would that be? What would they say to themselves to plaster over the unexplainable cracks of everyday existence, let alone a tsunami? What myths or lies do they hold true? How do they tell stories?
Now look back out your window -- look at what the gods have barfed out of your subconscious and into the world -- the warm, muddy river of dead cats, old women cauled in moist saris, aluminum propane canisters, a dead goat, flies that buzz unharmed just above the fray.
...picnic coolers
...clumps of grass
...a sunburnt Scandinavian pederast
...white plastic stacking chairs
...drowned soldiers tangled in gun straps
And then what do you do -- do you pray? What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.
And so I pray.
Copyright © 2009 by Douglas Coupland
It's been 18 years since Coupland (JPod) identified and deflated Generation X in his 1991 debut. Now he blends the end with a new beginning, taking on Generation A. Set in a deteriorating near future, it's the story of five young people: an Iowan who farms nude; a New Zealander whose parents have abdicated belief; a sullen Parisian addicted to World of Warcraft; a Tourette's-afflicted Canadian dental hygienist; and a Sri Lankan telemarketer whose family was erased by a tsunami. Digitally plugged-in but otherwise isolated, they rise from obscurity when stung by bees, creatures that everyone thought extinct. Brought together on a remote island, they are asked by a shadowy scientist to, of all things, tell stories. With deft twists, seemingly random details are melded with grace. VERDICT With strands of humor, sf, and social commentary, Coupland melds Chuck Palahniuk's wild imagination with Nick Hornby's character ensembles. This clever send-up of modern culture will send readers racing to the beginning to see what they missed on first pass. Lightning strikes twice! Coupland defines another generation and crafts a satisfying ode to the power of story.—Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA
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Coupland's thematic sequel to Generation X strives once more to explore and define the edges of group identity through a Decameron-style storytelling marathon. Taking place in a near-future in which bees have become inexplicably extinct, five young men and women become the subjects of fame and scientific curiosity when they're the first people in five years to suffer a sting. Zack, an Iowa farmer, is the first and is soon followed by Harj in Sri Lanka, Samantha in New Zealand, Diana in Canada and Julien, who resides in Paris but lives primarily in World of Warcraft. Captured by a clandestine organization headed by a man named Serge, the unlikely group is eventually moved to a remote island, where Serge compels them to recite stories. Always in the background are rumblings of the hyperaddictive drug Solon, which holds its users in a perpetual present. Coupland juggles some fascinating ideas, and the story circle holds equal parts humor and revelation, though the revolving crew of narrators—particularly the women—can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Despite its flaws, this book will interest readers in search of an intelligent look at pop and digital culture. (Dec.)
[Page 32]. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
