Girlfriend in a Coma

Pop quiz: what do you get when you cross Chuck Palahniuk with Canada?

[Hint: It's not the blandest fight club ever.]

Okay, so it's Douglas Coupland. Coupland is one of those "experimental" writers who think it's awesome to do stuff like put several pages of nothing but three-letter Scrabble words in their books. And maybe it is awesome; that's not my issue here. But that's the type of writer he is.

Anyway, Mr. Coupland has been running a blog on the New York Times website all summer. The blog is enteratining enough; it features tidbits about book tours, various insights about Canadian and American cultures, and pictures of random crap. It didn't make me want to run out and read all of his books, but it did make me go and pick up Girlfriend in a Coma for the sixth or seventh time--a book that I first read in high school and adored. Being an English major in college subsequently ruined all of my previous favorite books, but Girlfriend fared better than most. It's not all that strong on a literary basis, but the ideas in it that appealed to a cynical eighteen-year-old have only gotten more resonant seven years later.

The plot is weirdly overcomplicated, but limited to seven people and one town in a concession to simplicity. (One Hundred Years of Solitude this is not.) Canadian teenagers have sex for the first time in 1979; one of them falls into a coma the same night, sending their high school clique into seven different versions of banal adult hell. There's a baby born of the coma chick nine months later, and all sorts of weird circumstances conspire to keep the high school friends from leaving their trapped-in-the-70s neighborhood in Vancouver. There's even an apocalypse involved. Hot stuff.

Coupland uses it all to back up a comparatively simple thesis: that current life is empty. Drugs! Insularity! Facile psychobabble! Our obsessions with pop culture take a particularly hard hit; Coupland shows us how awful it all is by...stuffing glib pop culture references into every other sentence. So the line between condemnation and postmodern awareness is pretty blurry.

His overall point is still pretty valid. What would any of us do with a collapse of the everyday order? I don't think Coupland's vision of claustrophobic squabbles and self-obsession is all that inaccurate. Still, he chooses to take the interesting premise, and the hyperawareness-as-insight schtick, and cram it all into some easy moralizing. That part gets less palatable as I get older. He's got me sympathizing more with the less-than-fulfilling lives of the characters now; but getting me to feel guilty about my own craptastic existence and then offering nothing but cheap platitudes doesn't really lead us anywhere productive. If the world ends tomorrow, leaving me stuck in Connecticut with my group of friends, I won't know how to fix things properly, and it will be all Douglas Coupland's fault. I hope he's happy.

And now the extract section...or, "why you may want to read the book no matter what snarky things I may have said about it":

"I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they're being fondly admired."

"Wendy's working hard--too hard, it seems. She's not much in love with Linus--obvious to anybody--nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone's life immediately; the others think she is too out of it--too clued out about the modern world--but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths (Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!) and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.
Her friends are not particularly happy--not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.
'No.'
'Fulfilled?'
'No.'
'Creative?'
'A little.'
Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption."

"And then came October 14, 1978, the day Jared snuck up behind Wendy and whispered, See you after the game. Meet me in the parking lot. I've got a bag of candy to give you. And then came the collapse on the football field followed by the thousand passionate nights that never came Wendy's way. And she's never told anybody, because who would believe it? Because she is only Wendy: dutiful, sexless, brainy, and almost a tragedy (in her father's eyes) had Linus not happened along. Romantic beauty is for others."

"In London the supermodels wear Prada and the photographers snap their photos. The young princes read their Guinness Book of World Records. In California, meetings are held and salad is picked at. Across the globe hydro dams generate electricity and radio towers send powerful signals out to the heavens advertising Fiat Pandas and creme rinses. Golden lights oscillate wildly. Giant receiving dishes rotate and scour the universe for voices and miracles. And why shouldn't they?"

Early Bird

Yesterday on the T, I stood next to a feisty foursome, none of whom were under age sixty. They were very much the stereotypical Florida retirement community type: the guys wore bright-colored Bermuda shorts, the ladies wore flower patterned shirts over shapeless linen capris, and they talked incessantly about how Joan Rivers performing live standup was the funniest thing they've ever seen. What really caught my attention was their further conversation, though:

Wife #1: We should go to the aquarium. Did you hear about those seals that died?
Husband #1: No. Did you hear Bruno Kirby died?
Husband #2: Who's Bruno Kirby?
Wife #1: You know, Bruno Kirby. He was in those Billy Crystal movies. When Harry Met Sally, and that one about the cows.
Husband #2: What?
Husband #1, louder: Cows! City Slickers! Billy Crystal and cows!
Wife #2: I don't care for that Billy Crystal. Let's go to Faneuil Hall instead of the aquarium.

I was amused and more than a little charmed by these still-active senior citizens, until I realized that at some point, we're all going to be these people. After retirement, there's a pretty good chance that it's all circular conversations and yelling so that your increasingly deaf friends can hear you. And then the whole retirement community thing made a little more sense. Why subject yourself to the unspoken judgment of some kid next to you on public transportation, when you could surround yourself with people who are more likely to share your affinity for Joan Rivers?

Of course, it doesn't hurt that earlier in the week, I finished reading Rodney Rothman's Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement, and was predisposed to consider such things. Rothman's book explores what it's like to ditch one's burned-out working life at age 28, and venture early into retirement. Specifically, he seeks the authentic experience: living in a small community in Florida, among the people who actually worked and saved for forty years before going south. The shortcut certainly sounds appealing; working for so long feels kind of like a chump proposition, from the twentysomething end of things.

But if the premise is a bit cynical (particularly given that Rothman is a former writer for Letterman and other snarky TV shows), he turns it around into a sweeter narrative about his own development as a young-old person. Armed with guides like Successful Aging and an openness for activities like 4 pm dinners and shuffleboard, Rothman's goals become less about getting away from his own life and more about fitting into a new one. You know that part of Groundhog Day where the Bill Murray character grows a conscience and starts learning piano, feeding the homeless guy, etc.? The vibe is kind of like that, but articulated better, and less cheesily altruistic.

The best moments come from the casual social observations that come once Rothman is ensconced in Century Village (albeit illegally, as a boarder of a woman he found through a Florida-specific roommate finding service). It's almost comforting to know that the pervasiveness of high school cliques never really ends; the Mean Girls just convene by the pool instead of the cafeteria, and wear floppier hats. Ditto for the high school baseball team, only now there's a wiry, bearded Mennonite playing second base. Rothman tries to capitalize on his youth in all these activities and dominate the old people to reassure himself that he's not really retired, but often fails hilariously.

There's also a lot of surprising info about the citizens of retirement communities, such as the general vibrancy of their sex lives. JDate is quite the popular tool down there, apparently. And Rothman tries out the requisite dating for himself--keeping it to women his own age for the most part, but also pondering whether it's okay to sleep with an unexpectedly attractive 75-year-old woman, in one extremely funny chapter.

Ultimately, Rothman comes to the conclusion one might expect: that retirement is only viable for those who have a decade or two to revel in it, not five or six decades. But he made a good run at the lifestyle, and produced a highly entertaining book in the meantime.

Some favorite passages:

On the Great Florida Migration: "Many of these communities prohibited any resident under the age of fifty-five. To me, that seems delightfully vengeful and vindictive. It's like an act of civil disobedience. Millions of senior citizens shouting, 'You don't want us? We don't want you!' from the Florida peninsula, which suddenly resembled a giant downward-facing middle finger. It was a revolution, an octogenarian Boston Tea Party. The only difference was that these colonists would stick each tea bag in their purses for later use. Why let a perfectly good tea bag go to waste?" (24)

On baseball, played by the elderly or not: "The second baseman pivots and throws to first, and I barely beat out a double play....The old guys laugh. Then I hear Eli say from the dugout, 'If I had his hundred and sixty pounds on my body, I'd hit it a lot further than that.' I'm not sure if anyone has ever been dissed by a peace-loving Mennonite, but does it get lower than that?" (60)

On sex with an older woman: "I've been telling my friends I slept with Vivian. I didn't really. It's another one of my weather balloons. I get to see how they would have reacted if I had actually slept with her, without any of the guilt of having gone through with it.
It's interesting to see how people respond. Most find the idea so ridiculous they refuse to believe me. It's just not possible. My friend Jenni just snorts and says, 'You're a bad liar.' In the case of Nick, his reaction is several short, sharp intakes of breath, an awkward silence, a nervous laugh, and finally a troubled stamp of approval: 'Dude,' he says, 'that's awesome.'" (156)

On an 80-year-old standup comedienne: "Her act was a mix of 'dirty jokes and prop comedy.' She performs bits and pieces of it for me. 'I'd pull out a cucumber,' she tells me, 'and I'd say, "Ladies, who needs a man when you can buy cucumbers for a dollar?" And then I'd point at the knobs on the cucumber and say, "Men don't even have speed bumps!"'
'You said that?' I ask, a little shocked.
'People loved it,' she says.
The more I think about it, the more I like her cucumber joke. It's the perfect joke for an eighty-year-old raunch to tell, combining shock value with coupon clipping. And as far as fruit-and-vegetable humor goes, it sure as hell beats hitting watermelons with sledgehammers." (69)

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People

If The Devil Wears Prada taught us anything, it's that Conde Nast can be an extremely unpleasant place to work. Of course, Lauren Weisberger tried to deny that the setting for her fashion magazine hell was Conde Nast at all--she did a bang-up job of changing names, and turning a lobby ficus into a potted palm. But we (and probably Anna Wintour's lawyers) knew the deal. However, Weisberger was constrained at all times by the Chick Lit Code: veil thinly, but veil like the dickens so nobody can sue you for a fictionalized memoir. Oprah would approve.

In How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Toby Young doesn't buy into that bullshit, mostly because he wants people to know that he worked for Vanity Fair, and wants it more than anything in the world. If you don't happen to know that he spent a few months on staff there, then his entire life is for naught. And so, much of the book is about his time at the magazine: his flukey invitation from Graydon Carter to be a contributing editor; his charmless alienation of the entire staff; and his wacky (and yet somehow still lame) attempts to get Vanity Fair to incorporate British-style humor in its glossy pages. Young adopts the outsider perspective right away, and fights hard to keep it. For example, he uses the motif of the Vanity Fair Oscar party in several places; ostensibly he's complaining about how he can't get in with his own name. Yet it's pretty clear that sneaking in and working hard to get himself banished is his raison d'etre, if not the raison de book deal. The whole book is like that. He solicits sympathy for the fact that he can't get ahead as a writer/socialite, but would probably be bored if he weren't snubbed and amusingly downtrodden. And he knows we'd be bored too. So he keeps plugging along, assuming that his personality is enough to carry everything.

And you know what? It kinda is. Enough writers do the self-pity, but not many do it with the kind of energy that keeps Charlie Brown heading to the football field every damn time. It probably doesn't hurt that Toby Young even looks rather Charlie Brown-esque. And the surprising elements do help make up for the narcissism. Graydon Carter could have been portrayed horribly, according to every other publishing memoir that ever included a difficult editor-in-chief. But Young gives him a pass while exploring the darker sides of their odd working relationship. Young saves the vitriol for a long diatribe about former New Yorker editrix Tina Brown, which is pretty hilarious in its depth and its lack of concern for the fact that she could easily have his testicles on a platter if she really wanted them.

The stuff that skews toward the publishing insider is what ultimately makes the book entertaining, given that half the people I know would give kidneys to have opportunities like Toby Young has had. I just doubt that any of us would have the chutzpah to screw it up so spectacularly and flaunt that fact. And there is plenty of useful information as well; where else would one find a list of words and terms banned from ever being used in Vanity Fair? (FYI: you will never see "plethora," "golfer," "fuck" (the verb), "funky," "weird," or any synonym for "said" in the pages of the magazine.)

Some of the more entertaining excerpts:

"When the party started winding down, I attached myself to a group of people heading over to Bowery Bar--here, at last, was my chance to get in. The group included the infamous Vanity Fair columnist George Wayne, a flamboyant, Jamaican homosexual. Among his many idiosyncracies, George has the celebrity's habit of always referring to himself in the third person. I'd never met a black homosexual before and, sitting next to him in the cab on the way to East 4th Street, I was slightly intimidated.
'So George,' I asked, trying to break the ice, 'how long have you been a hack?'
'A hack?' he replied in horror. 'G.W. is not a hack. He's a belletrist, darling. A FUCKING BELLETRIST!'
I decided to keep my trap shut after that."

"Conde Nast editors have developed a whole vocabulary to convey their bitchy, slightly camp worldview. An inadequately-decorated restaurant, for instance, is an 'airport lounge,' or--worse--a 'McDonald's,' while an overcrowded club or party is a 'rat fuck' or a 'cluster fuck.' A person who's less than drop-dead gorgeous is 'scary-looking,' and anyone who calls twice in one day, no matter how urgent their business, is a 'stalker.' It's as if they're celebrities having to contend with troublesome fans. The worst epithet that can be applied to anyone is that he or she is 'over.'"

Killing Yourself to Live

Chuck Klosterman is a pop culture guru of sorts. Just ask Chuck Klosterman. But Chuck Klosterman's real passion is writing about Chuck Klosterman.

There. Now you know what it's like to read Killing Yourself to Live. Don't be misled by the title, or the conceit that the author sets up at the beginning of the book: that Spin magazine practically begged him to go on a road trip and muse about all the great rock 'n roll deaths. Oh, sure, there are rental cars and desolate towns where low-grade rockstars died like, well, rockstars, in fiery crashes or pukey overdoses. There are even a few interviews with locals about where, exactly, half of the Allman Brothers Band checked out. But the parade of dead guys never even approaches the main stage. That's reserved for Chuck's musings on all the women he has loved/still loves/doesn't really love, but still sleeps with/will ever love.

Depending on your perspective, this could easily be false advertising. If, say, a person picks up the book wanting to know more about that nightclub fire in Rhode Island and how the members of Great White are subsequently holding up--and finds hundreds of pages of Chuck talking about some chick who is now dating an architect--then something is going to be way off. But if one is reading it for the sake of reading Chuck Klosterman's witty one-liners, it just kinda fits, in a resigned kind of way. And there's another camp as well: if one read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and thought, "Hey, there's just not enough personal info about Chuck in here," then this is a perfect book. On any given page, I found myself vacillating between all three of those modes. I can't actually stay mad at good old Chuck. Mostly because I probably wouldn't have picked up a book about dead rockstars anyway if his name weren't on it.

That's why it's so frustrating when he gets bogged down in the details of the three main women in his life. There are entertaining anecdotes, most of which have more to do with Klosterman's own history and not necessarily the chicks (like a few pages about his "nemesis," or bits about how a thoroughly midwestern kid adapts to urban writer hipsterism). And even when he's obsessing about Diane, Quincy, or Lenore (none of whom I can tell apart) ad nauseam, he still makes quality, funny observations that transcend the belly gazing. So my patience hovered around The Line for much of the book, mostly giving him the benefit of the doubt based on general wittiness. That is, until everything kind of implodes in a multiple-page wreck of a simile in which he compares every woman he's ever met with every member of KISS. Seriously. What might have been cute for a paragraph or two is merely horrific after about three pages. Maybe I just don't care enough about Gene Simmons's solo work, or about the freelance drummer who performed with the band on one of its reunion tours. But my God....there's no real justification for this. Had he tried to link the women to John Lennon, Buddy Holly, or one of the other dead musicians, he might have been able to justify it on a structural basis. But alas...not so much.

Yet I can't condemn the book (or Klosterman) overall because I can't stand KISS, or because of a torturous love letter to the band that was clearly the author's real goal in getting a book deal to write about musicians. After all, it's still Chuck. I knew what I was getting when I grabbed the paperback at Borders. I just wish he hadn't bothered with the obvious effort of trying to push a memoir through a strained metaphor about how musicians have to die to be real rockstars. I probably would have paid the same cover price for something called Chuck's Chicks: Or, How I Pissed Off Every Woman I've Touched.

Some favorite passages, which guarantee I'll continue to read whatever frustrating wackiness he publishes next:

On trying to explain why the book is metafictionally messy: "In all probability, you will also complain about the author's reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness, which will prompt the person you're conversing with to criticize the influence of Dave Eggers on the memoir-writing genre. Then your cell phone will ring, and you will meet someone for brunch." (18)

On how Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was an album about the band's own hookups and breakups: "Predictably, Q always took Stevie Nicks's side in the debate, and I always aligned myself with control freak Lindsey. 'The fact that Lindsey Buckingham even wrote a song like this proves he's a jackass,' Q would say. 'What kind of asshole forces his ex-girlfriend to sing backing vocals on a song that accuses her of being a slut?' In retrospect, this does seem egocentrically vindictive. Still, I think Stevie Nicks totally had it coming, especially in light of the fact that she later shacked up with Don Henley." (142)

On writing and one of his women: "A few months prior, I had also written a piece about Lenore that ran in GQ, because that's the kind of thing self-indulgent, first-person writers inevitably do. I have no idea what compels me to do these things; I will never understand why I need to write about the events that other people merely experience. And even though Lenore understands that this is how I am, she remains uncomfortable about having thousands of people read about my personal feelings toward her, particularly when the things I write are often things I would never say.
'Why didn't you tell me you loved me?' she asks by the lake. 'It's on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.'
'That's not true,' I say. 'I told you I loved you seven times.' This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I've told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in emails, and once was when I was drunk." (173)