GENERATION A
Douglas Coupland
Scribner
Fiction
ISBN: 9781439157015
It’s hard to say if GENERATION A is more simplistic, stodgy grumbling or sophisticated social satire. Blaming the Internet and smart-phones for shorter attention spans and decreased social intimacy feels a little old. But Douglas Coupland’s polyphonic narrative, curious world-building and bizarre twist endings take this novel in interesting directions worth exploring. The book puts a new spin on the way our world has changed and the consequences of greedily --- and perhaps mindlessly --- devouring new technologies. And in a world where “social” is a prefix attached to everything now (-media, -marketing, -publishing, etc.), why are we so lonely?
In the near future, there’s a new over-the-counter drug on the market called Solon, an anti-anxiety medication that eliminates a consumer’s sense of time and eases them into a comforting --- and extremely isolating --- present. The world is faced with plant species dying out without the bees to pollinate them and the breakdown of social relationships everywhere as Solon users become increasingly withdrawn from society.
Five relatively young adults from around the planet (Iowa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Paris and Canada) give their accounts of socially isolating lives in a world that is theoretically ultra-conducive to socialization. Their loneliness --- more aloneness, really --- is brought out just enough to make the point, but not to interfere with Coupland’s wry wit. An emotionally overwrought novel this is not. Their lives are quiet and full of desperation until they are each stung by a bee and immediately swept away by agents in biohazard suits to hidden labs to undergo endless testing. Imprisoned for weeks in rooms designed to elicit no emotional reactions (notably by the removal of media and brand names), they must ponder an even deeper isolation until they are released.
The second act of the novel portrays them trying to fit back into their lives, though their anonymity has been shattered by their newfound celebrity. Some take it better than others (the Iowan Zack is knee-deep in Playboy bunny-esque girls infatuated with him for getting stung; Harj, a Sri Lankan customer service representative for Abercrombie & Fitch is embraced by the cherubic preps he calls “Craigs” who work at the company headquarters), but all of them struggle with yet another kind of aloneness as their lives can never be what they once were, and they start to yearn for each other. Despite never meeting in their neutrality rooms, they quickly learned about each other through the prompt international media storm, and their shared experience draws them together.
They’re allowed to meet when abducted once again to an island removed from civilization, forced to tell each other stories around a campfire by the scientist behind their kidnapping. He hopes that telling stories will put his subjects in the right mood to produce specific “microproteins” (don’t try to unpack the sketchy neuroscience-fiction; just run with it), which have some connection with Solon and the near-extinction of bees. Through their mostly grim stories --- as telling of the anxieties and spurned desires of this age group as anything you’re likely to come across --- the five learn their role in a larger conspiracy and begin to connect the dots about the world around them. The narrative here is mostly stories-within-stories and big reveals, and while it feels like Coupland is just rushing to spit out everything he wants to say, it’s necessary rushing after a first act of sly allusions and only mild barbs.
Coupland’s shorter witticisms make some of the best reading in GENERATION A. Zack’s rant against Monsanto and the U.S.’s sickening relationship with corn --- “buttery carb dildos” as he puts it --- is delightful reading. One of Harj’s offhand comments eloquently punctures one of the decade’s greatest myths of our living in an equitable global village: “Could I ever be a Craig? No. A person must be born into Craigdom, with its multiple ski holidays, complex orthodontia, proper nutrition and casual, healthy view of recreational sex.” The stories --- more like fables, really --- that the five tell, though brief, are penetrating probes into our modern world.
Coupland’s greater themes get spottier. While his damning of 21st-century hyper-communication is relatively coherent, his metaphors feel a little confused. The role of Solon in his critique isn’t as clear as it needs to be, and its relationship to technology-overloaded isolationism is too cloudy to act as a concise abstraction of a complicated issue. His rendering of our society’s addiction to techno-social innovations (Twitter et al are clearly in his sights) is sharp and sobering, but his criticisms of new technologies on the whole as a devil’s path that leads to complete degenerate idiocy is overly simplistic. Also, his defense of some golden age of book-reading feels hollow. For as much as our attention spans have shortened and our petulant demands for constant content whenever and however we want it have increased, there are genuine benefits in our Web 2.0-powered world (this website, for one). Coupland’s argument isn’t sophisticated enough for 2009. Fortunately, he fares much better at capturing the mindset of a generation: smart but innocent babes in a Garden of Eden (to paraphrase from Vonnegut’s epigraph) incapable of properly analyzing their world’s complexity.
But for all the novel’s faults, be they intellectual or artistic, GENERATION A is a quick, funny and earnest read. Though Coupland misses the mark, its passion is infectious. And I can’t criticize a smart, witty novel that doubles as an impassioned defense of reading novels too harshly.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
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