What’s the buzz?

I can’t say that I’ve loved every word Douglas Coupland’s ever written, but by and large I enjoy his work quite a lot. His novels are observant, quirky, and very funny. So, I was looking forward to Generation A. And I enjoyed reading it, but I wanted to like it so much more than I did. I think my biggest problem is that I felt like I was reading two different books. The first half of this novel did not seem to match up with the second.

The novel is primarily told from the points of view of five individuals from five different lifestyles and countries. What bonds them is that they all share an extraordinary experience. They are each stung by a bee—at a time (roughly the year 2024) when no one’s seen a bee for five or six years. They’ve long been assumed extinct, and the world suffers for it. Fruits and flowers are incredibly rare, and must be labor-intensively hand pollinated. Honey is like gold. The bees are essentially the canaries in our coal mine, and the future isn’t looking too bright.

This is so much an issue, that there’s a new, hyper-addictive drug on the market called Solon. It keeps users in the present, instead of all that pesky worrying about the future. It also makes time pass quicker and helps alleviate loneliness, so that users can “live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.” So, it is in this near future that Zack from Iowa, Samantha from New Zealand, Julien from Paris, Harj from Sri Lanka, and Diana from Canada become instant worldwide celebrities—and subjects of scientific scrutiny.

And I was really engaged in this somewhat bizarre story. I was totally digging it! But as things moved forward, the plot veered off into left field. For reasons I won’t get into, the B5 (as they are called) spend the second half of the novel telling each other quirky stories they’ve made up. Very little happens as a series of sometimes charming short stories are recited, and the ideas behind Coupland’s satire are driven home.

Eventually there are revelations that somewhat tie the two halves of the novel together, but I found the ending to be weird and somewhat grotesque. There were definitely pleasures to be had in the reading of this novel. Coupland’s just too darn good for that not to be the case, but Generation A never quite came together as a cohesive work. ( )

I suppose it's no surprise that I loved this novel; anything pulls together fundamentalist Christian oddities, anti-poverty observations, and anti-cheap corn/Monsanto imagery in the first five pages is bound to appeal to me. Allusions to many other works I love--the internet, Brave New World, media-created phenomenon of H1N1--and allegories of loneliness make this book humorous and appealing to my demographic. (This book strikes me more as allegory than actual Science Fiction; I don't think he's trying to create any illusion of the world described really being an Other from our world right now.) But as the book develops (spoiler alerts) Coupland moves into profound reflections on the place of story and narrative within our world. At the end of the book, as the characters comment on the individualism and alienation from community created in the process of novel-reading, I was squirming uncomfortably as my husband asked me questions that I couldn't answer because I was involved in my own little world in the book. What I love about this book is that it brings in the meta-questions without diminishing the importance of the just plain questions--why are the bees dying? Why don't we want to make communities anymore? How can we stop Monsanto? The questions of "What does novel-reading do to us?" and "Is that important or even a good thing?" are not elevated (theory-style) above the content questions and the skewering of corporate culture. I also finished the book in two days and enjoyed every page-turning minute of it. I found Generation A much more readable and intelligent than The Gum Thief; this novel will give me mental floss for weeks. ( )

Entertaining read; I was concerned that the second half of the book would not come together, but it did, in a neat little package connecting all of the seemingly random elements together into a story. Solon does seem like a marketable drug in the digital age... the new Soma. ( )

This is a difficult review. The things is, I just love Coupland's writing, and because of that I enjoyed this more than anything I've read since, well, Coupland's last novel. But this was actually a little odd. The first half was wonderful, classic Coupland, a great story about life after bees, great characters, his usual brilliant turn of phase. And then... well, it kind of fell apart. It moved into Gum Thief territory, with the characters telling a succession of deliberately oddly /badlywritten stories (similar to Glove Pond in Gum Thief). And then the ending was just a bit daft.

But all the same, beautifully written, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved every sentence of it. But I'm a bit of a fanboy here, so what do I know? ( )

"Coupland's real misstep is in having Generation A narrated in first person by five separate individuals. It can take a master stylist to pull off five distinct personalities, and Coupland is not up to it. His five characters are too similar; each talks with the same cadences and rhythms, the same cultural cross-references. There is something to the idea that a rapidly shrinking world will lead to a homogeneity of speech patterns, but even accepting that premise, the difference between each character is razor-thin. One character, Diana, suffers from Tourette's, and even with her frequent bursts of obscenities, it's hard to tell her apart from the others. And as her affliction doesn't go anywhere, it's hard to say why Coupland felt compelled to include it."

Read the rest of the review here. ( )