I found this book primarily perplexing. It’s about a few decades worth of fallout from a high school shooting, way before Columbine… It’s about religion and faith and family and coping and relating to the world. And it’s about love, because most things are, when you get down to it.
That said, there was something I found a bit perplexing about it somehow. I couldn’t connect, exactly, to its emotional core. Was I supposed to? With Coupland, it’s hard to tell. It was an interesting story, one I read in mostly one shot… so obviously the writing was good… but I’m puzzled about it. I don’t know how I feel… It might be, ultimately, forgettable… Huh.

(P.S. This hour has 200 minutes (a.k.a. Stanley Cup Playoffs) is pretty good for getting a lot of reading done…)

This book was centered around four main characters: Cheryl, Jason, Heather and Reg. The book is divided into four parts, one for each character.

In the first part, Cheryl describes the Columbine-like shooting in her school during her senior year in 1988. Her and her boyfriend Jason had just gotten secretly married six weeks ago and she just found out last night that she was pregnant. She goes back and forth between the events that led to her death and the events that led to her marriage of Jason. She is in a sort of purgatory with darkness and silence and she can only hear certain prayers, but just the words, not the voices behind them.

I was hooked from the very first part since I just finished reading The Lovely Bones and having the character talk about her life while she was dead seemed very similar to me.

The next part fast forwards in time to 1999 and is written from the viewpoint of Jason. He is writing a letter to his nephews and manages to express only his hatred for his father, Reg and the fact that he has never gotten over Cheryl’s death. He expresses that he blacks out when he’s been drinking and especially so when other drugs are involved. There’s a few pages where he’s blacked out and some strange things happen to him. I never really fully understood what was going on during those few pages, so I might need to read them again.

Heather writes the third part in 2002, three months after Jason’s disappearance. She is Jason’s girlfriend and the closest thing to a stable relationship he’s had since Cheryl. She is approached by a psychic who tells her things only her and Jason would ever know. She trusts the psychic as she has no other choice if she wants to find out what happened to Jason and if he’s still alive.

While I was reading Jason’s part, I was looking forward most to Reg’s part, the final part which takes place in 2003. Reg is one of those holier-than-thou types and has some pretty atrocious beliefs. He told Jason’s sister-in-law that one of her twin boys might not have a soul because technically, one was a clone of the other one and he didn’t believe clones could have souls. He treated Jason and his mother poorly. In the end though, there is no satisfying resolution with Reg.

I thought the book was well written and interesting, but I was left feeling that there wasn’t much point to it. What was it all for? Perhaps I’m supposed to be left with this feeling. The book’s central theme is that God may no longer be there for His people. He may no longer care to help them or hear them. In that effect, I think it would be more aptly titled “Hey Nietzsche!” rather than “Hey Nostradamus!”

I really didn’t think I was going to like this book at all when I first heard about it (so why I decided to read it, I do not know) but I was pleasantly surprised and might end up checking out some of Douglas Coupland’s other books.

While Coupland threw in a couple of plot twists that I didn’t think were necessary, overall this is a very compelling and nuanced read. The narrative structure is very complex, weaving a web of sins that ultimately leads to redemption through a sacrificed son. Brings up some very interesting questions about the holiness of everyday life and the nature of fate, not to mention it was a very fast read. Coupland’s writing is both concise and lyrical, an accomplishment that is worthy of praise in and of itself.

this was much more serious than a typical Coupland novel but I still liked it. Coupland managed to find the voice of all his characters and the book was well put together.