Girlfriend in a Coma

by: Douglas Coupland

Here is a book unlike anything I’ve ever read, written like nothing anything I’ve ever seen. It starts as a normal sotry about a high school girl named Karen who slips into a coma in 1979 at the age of seventeen. Just prior to her coma she began to have dark visions about the future that she warned her boyfriend Richard about. Nine months after she’s fallen into the coma, she pops out a baby girl named Megan.

For the next seventeen years Karen sleeps while her friends, family and Richard kind of float through life without ever finding or ever searching for any meaning. When Karen awakens their lives suddenly change and amazing things begin to spiral. It seems every moment in their life had brought them to that point. And then an “It’s a wonderful life” twisted backwards, frontwards, and downwards happens. It’s then they’re own morality and basic common decency is tested. Which brings them to one final choice in the end.

The story had me locked from the get-go with Couplands fanciful tempo of writing and the questions he immediately began to pose. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say or do or even where the story would end up, but I found the portion while Karen slept to be funny in a very sinister way. My favorite line was from Richard when he said in his thirties looking back at the choices he made in his life. “I wonder if you had to right now, would you put your lives choices, the ones that would dictate where you ended up in the hands of a seventeen year old?” Read it and you will understand it’s meaning.

By the end of the story I was questioning myself, my own convictions, what my intents were in the world, my own why’s, and I actually on some level felt myself relating to what I think Coupland was trying to say. While I continued through the book, which turned more science fiction halfway through than dark comedy, I found myself being enlightened while simultaneously entertained. I can’t say enough about the pleasure this book was. I’m very curious to pick up another novel by this author. Until then I’m reading “Dirt” the Motley Crue autobiography, and will be back with it’s review soon enough.

Kumtriah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!