The Solace of Open Season

Douglas Coupland will forever be associated with Generation X. That is not his fault. I mean, how would you like a little accidental name-branding and the lazy-mindedness of others to determine how you're pigeon-holed? And forget circumstances of birth. I don't know a single person who chose when, where, or to whom they were born.

The astute reader then might get beyond the catchphrase and the birth date and instead cite Coupland the chronicler. He's more Todd Solondz than Alvin Toffler, and it is to his great credit that he can write modernity with such cinematic clarity and still maintain an unsafe distance from its promise. Or lack thereof. After all, a life need not always be foretold, just told well.

Hey NostrodamusWell told and then some is Hey Nostradamus! (Bloomsbury $21.95), Coupland's latest exploration into the multitudes and magnitudes of our small days and the "broken, sad people" who populate them. It is a soul search, full of minor wonder and supersized tragedy, and it digs up one great truth: alienation is inclusive.

In this case it includes the Y's, those holders of too many worthless Gen-X-marked promissory notes. "Why not?" has become "Why bother?" and the sibs are understandably bitter. Some choose to set themselves adrift, others choose to set themselves on fire, still others prefer taking everyone down in whatever flames that are available.

Witness The Massacre at Delbrook High, the bloodbath that begins (and commands) Hey Nostradamus! It's an event not so much ripped from the headlines as it is torn from the hearts and minds of those the headlines have long forgotten, the casualties who are forced to come of age amid the glare of the dead.

Take Jason, for instance, the spiritual soul of this stirring story. The invisible son of a pep-talking father ("You're nothing, you hear me?") from the dumbside of fire ("You're not even visible to God.") and the blindside of brimstone ("You're not even visible to the devil."), he's a lad not without a few soiled back issues ("You are zero."). Thankfully one of those issues isn't a sense of self-importance ("I can barely get the automatic doors at Save-On-Foods to acknowledge my existence.")

It is Jason who will prove to be truly brave.

Secretly wed to Heather, a proverbial mixed-up wanna-be-good girl he met among the ultra-right-living (and downright annoying) Youth Alive! Group, Jason's already a mess of shadows and secrets. Bumbling Romeo to bewitched Juliet, they have the kinda star-crossed love only religion and authority can inspire, the damned love that dare not speak up for itself.

To each other and each other alone, they are everything. So when the bloody shit hits the ceiling fans and some "loser gang" starts shooting up the school it is to Heather's rescue that Jason comes. And it is there, in a cafeteria consumed by carnage, that he finds God.

Oh, fret not, Coupland's not runnin' some standard-issue God Hustle. (We know he knows better than that.) Here "God is how you deal with everything that's out of your control." It's an in-the-details deity, bigger than any storied rule book, the kind you might find hanging on the corner of insight and enlightenment. The kinda God that allows cats like Jason to become heroes. And widowers. And suspects. All before they're capped-and-gowned.

This is too much for this lost boy, and before long Jason will lose himself completely.

But nothing ends where it shouldn't and eleven years later we catch up with everyone's favorite forgotten subject ("he never really got over it, you know") , now doin' occasional construction, more frequent drinking and drugging, and coming off with the odd observation ("Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me."). Jason's also come to like - no, prefer - talking to the animals, his connection to the "beautiful world."

And it is through some Doolittle-like ventriloquism that he comes to know Heather, another walking lost-and-lonely who speaks in animal tongues. Or at least voices. A toy store line sets the stage for a relationship. The art - and the spark - of nonsense banter is like a tonic for a so-so life, a soothing salve to put on their own private wounds. But even the most potent salve can only soothe so much hurt, and there isn't an ointment in the aisle of Riteway that can treat haunt. Jason - the hurt and the haunted - again disappears.

It's a convenient act, for it gives Heather a chance to bring out her inner obsessive. Trails are followed, leads are run down, gumshoes are enlisted and psychics consulted. Jason, once the cure-all, becomes Heather's personal crusade, a cause celebre for the causeless and the uncelebrated.

Aiding in his own evil way - and in fact reigning over the whole of the story - is Reg, possibly one of the most despicable creatures in bright, new fiction. A bully and a bore and a zealot and a crank, he is one of those "lonely broken men" made from "cheapness and vanity" for whom comeuppance was explicitly created. Even the baby blowhards of Youth Alive! can barely stomach the man, and they too are an unstomachable lot.

Hence it's a bit of a surprise to find that Daddy Dearest gets the last word. (I would've muzzled him from the get.) Maybe that's just Coupland getting in on the contrary, allowing us a wryly sardonic au contraire.

It's a twist.

Coupland has always had a simple elegance about him; his cosmos is rendered with an impeccable aloofness. Hey Nostradamus! is no exception. Actually it's quite an exceptional addition to what's become quite the canon. Like Richard Ford writing the lives of which Leonard Cohen sings, he gives voice to the obsessed, the compulsed, and the dispossessed. In the process he proves that there's no safe place anymore, anywhere. If your neurosis doesn't get you, something or someone else will. The shadows are armed, and we all must find the solace of open season.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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