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Generation A
 
 

Generation A [Paperback]

Douglas Coupland
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Quill & Quire

Generation A, Douglas Coupland’s 11th novel, is a great bookend to Generation X, the novel that launched his career. The term “Generation A” was in fact coined by Kurt Vonnegut, but Coupland embraces it and makes it his own. The narrative is written from alternating first-person points of view, a tactic that harkens back to Generation X. The story takes place at a time in the near future when honeybees have become extinct. Five people (referred to in the novel as the “Wonka children”) are mysteriously stung. At the heart of the mystery is the controversial drug Solon, which allows its users to suppress anxiety by living exclusively in the present. Like detective fiction, the book uncovers the connections between the Wonka children and this dangerous drug, but it also plays with narrative conventions by illustrating the ways that people tell stories in our increasingly digital, ultra-high-speed world. If Generation X gave us “tales for an accelerated culture,” then Generation A is its natural extension, offering tales for the information overloaded. The bite-sized chapters and witty tone will appeal to those with perpetual attention defi cits, and bits of pop culture sprinkled liberally throughout will attract readers highly attuned to the current zeitgeist. Coupland clearly understands the minds of the current generation – young people who have never known a time without the Internet – and plays on their desire to jump continually from one subject to the next. To what end does this cultural ADD affect our lives and the ways we communicate with others? How can we silence the sounds of data that are constantly streaming into our heads? Are deeper human connections becoming more possible thanks to the Internet, or does the lack of face-time increase our alienation? Coupland explores these questions without resorting to obvious, cynical answers. He even manages to offer a hopeful ending, despite the odds. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

‘With this exceptional sequel to Generation X, Douglas Coupland may be one of the smartest, wittiest writers around… He is a terrifically good writer…Generation A is set in the near future… Bees have become extinct, but then five people are stung…It is the attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery that brings the five together on an Alaskan island [actually BC island!] where they are made to tell stories to one another. Coupland weaves common elements across these tales and into the main narrative: large themes… comic themes… existential themes… There is a compelling plot… Coupland scatters his smartly satirical observations throughout…This is a clever, brilliant book — and it’s loads better than Generation X…funny and profound.’
Esquire UK

‘Eighteen years on from Generation X, Coupland still satirises pop culture better than anyone. This globe-spanning tale, set in the near future, is masterfully told and often hilarious.’
GQ UK

I know I’m not alone in thinking that Douglas Coupland is one of our finest chroniclers of modern life…. He’s funny, though, and maybe that’ s his ‘problem.’ Memo to the Custodians of CanLit: Big Ideas can be delivered with humour and wit.”
National Post

"Douglas Coupland is the greatest Canadian ironist of his time. . . . A far-fetched and enjoyable romp. . . . If he lives long enough, he could go through the alphabet of generations and entertain us thoroughly in the process. . . . A world without bees is hard to imagine. It's almost as hard to imagin[e] a Canada without Coupland."
The Globe and Mail

"As you're revelling in Coupland's wit and political acumen, a knockout section offering a trenchant commentary on storytelling suddenly hits you: how the best tales work, what inspires us and how stories can change the world. Don't miss it."
NOW


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4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Generation Joy, Oct 27 2009
By 
Jamieson Villeneuve "Author at Large" (Ottawa Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Generation A (Hardcover)
I always await the publication of a new Douglas Coupland novel with something approaching the anticipation of Christmas morning. I need it now now now and I can't wait to open it and see what's inside.

Thankfully, Generation A by Douglas Coupland is the greatest of gifts and one of the best books I have read in a long time. It may even top my current Coupland favourite, JPod.

Generation A is set in a world that is incredibly familiar to our own. But clearly quite a few things have changed. There are drugs we can take to slow down our lives. Things like apples are incredibly hard to come by. And bees are extinct.

That is, until five people, in different corners of the world get stung by five separate bees. The Wonka Children, so they call themselves, struggle to live in a world after they have become celebrity/freaks where, because of a bee sting, they become famous.

If it sounds bizarre, that's because it is. And delightfully so.

The novel is told from the five points of view from the five sting victims. Don't worry, the chapters are told in delightfully short bursts (no chapter over ten pages here, folks) to fit into our high tech life-style. When you're on the run, your reading time is quick.

Coupland manages to cram some incredible things into those short chapters. After reading Generation A, I've been exposed to nakedness, religion, voyerism, different religious beliefs, call centres, references to the Simpsons (Mmmmm....honey), parody's of American culture, the point and purpose life, whether it is better to believe in a higher power versus not, the ideas and fundamentals of what makes people real.

I could go on.

It is a delightful mental marathon that makes me want to keep up. It is such an intelligent piece of writing and it reads like Dan Brown on crack. I mean that in a very good way. Think of Hunter S Thompson mixed with Oscar Wilde, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shelds and Jack Kerouack.

It is an incredibly environmental book, but it is also a very intense look at our culture and our dependence on media and media devices. It is about our dependence on a lot of things. It is wonderfully funny and humorous and at the same time rather grim and mysterious.

In short, it is a joy.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Generation is the best novel I've read all year, Oct 10 2009
By 
This review is from: Generation A (Hardcover)
With a diatribe against corn and an Earth sandwich within the first nine pages of this novel, I knew Coupland's latest would be worth buying. I live in the States, but decided to order from Amazon.ca as *Generation A* came out in Canada a month and a half earlier. I have no regrets, this book is awesome!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Fiction that reveals greater truths than non-fiction, Aug 31 2009
By 
sean s. (montreal) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Generation A (Hardcover)
There are books of fiction that reveal greater truths than non-fiction, because the revelations it makes are still largely in our collective unconscious, waiting to surface. Generation A by Douglas Coupland is such a book.

In a sense it is a sequel to Coupland's now classic Generation X, but a special sort of sequel, about New Beginnings rather than about a final conclusion. After all, "Generation X" ended up being used to label the post-boomer generation, leaving only two generations, Y and Z before... (religious fundamentalists can tell you the end of the story).

So Coupland has decided on a theme of Hope rather than despair, and with this choice he is aligned with an intense yearning of the Zeitgeist, reflected in the recent election of Obama, and the epic yet uncertain fight against global warming.

Generation A is set in the very near future, when bees have gone extinct. Or so everyone had thought, until five people are stung in different areas of the world. As a universally-recognized fertility symbol symptomatic of the health of the planet, these bee stings are the messenger of precarious hope.

However, "precarious" is the operative word:

"When I was growing up, Mother Nature was this reasonably hot woman who looked a lot like the actress Glenn Close wearing a pale blue nightie. When you weren't looking, she was dancing around the fields and the barns and the yard, patting the squirrels and French kissing butterflies. After the bees left and the plants started failing, it was like she'd returned from a Mossad boot camp with a shaved head, steel-trap abs and commando boots and man, was she pissed."

Coupland's five protagonists are engaging and diverse, inadvertent stars in a celebrity-obsessed world. What they have in common is their youth, and the opportunity their common experience has given them to think about life.

There is Zack from rural Iowa, a corn farmer who makes extra cash doing Web porn from his tractor. There is Samantha from New Zealand, who meets virtual friends to make "earth sandwiches". There is Julien, a student at the Sorbonne, who is enraged when his avatar from the World of Warcraft disappears suddenly, after 114 consecutive days of marathon sessions.

There is Diana from North Bay, Ontario, a fundamentalist Christian with Tourette's syndrome ("F-cks-it-p-ss-c-unt"). And there is Harj, who works in customer service for Abercrombie & Fitch's Midwest United State division - from a call center in Sri Lanka.

Despite its very current references, Generation A is, like Coupland's Generation X, a timeless work, in the sense that its themes are existential.

The five young adults are characterized by anomie, and above all, by an unconscious or even conscious desire to escape Life: into imaginary realities of webcams, Facebook "friends" on the opposite ends of the earth, videogames, imaginary kingdoms of God, or in the case of Harj, imaginary kingdoms of Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing New Englanders.

The natural world, the physical world, just isn't good enough. In the words of Julien, "All I wanted was to be back in World of Warcraft, not on this wretched planet with its trees and old crones and cause and effect."

As in his previous novels, Coupland is an astute observer, presenting our world as it is: without meaning other than that which we give it. Whereas our ancestors created myths to compensate for a life that was too short, we create distractions to take our minds off a life that is too long. One day without checking our e-mail is a boring eternity. And one of the things that most unnerves the five protagonists is that the rooms they are put in for observation contain furniture with no logos!

Is Nature good enough? Or is self-anesthesia through World of Warcraft or pharmaceuticals better? You'll have to read Generation A to find out!
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