Coupland, Douglas. Hey, Nostradamus! New York: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Here’s my favorite part of this book (or at least what I noted as such, last night, just before finishing; this book was read sporatically, in bed, over the course of a few weeks, which is not an ideal reading approach, but anyway):

Autumn? Autumn was time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English while they carded wool. Winters were spent in the rain, grooming the fields—I was raised to believe that the opposite of labor is theft, not leisure. I remember my boots sinking in mud that tried to steal my knees, its sucking noise (222-32).

The voice here is artful, tender, and authentic. It comes at the end of a book structured in four parts, where each part allows a different character to narrate, and maybe because all the others are relatively young (compared to the sixty-something narrator above) they sound like boring young people either trying too clumsily to grab at something poignant or dodging poignancy all together in the name of style. “After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me (101),” is an illustrative example found pretty much at random.

There’s a ton of this sort of thing throughout the book, and if I were more on top of my game I’d call it Couplandian. I’ve read his Microserfs, Generation X, Girlfriend in a Coma, and Life after God, and what’s lasted for me of those books (particularly the last two) is a vague spirituality or even supernaturalism that I think is supposed to be a path to revelation or redemption but for me has usually been an obstacle to same. I think I remember liking GenX best, but like with Microserfs there was something about its redemption-through-Legos story that I found a little too cute. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Coupland can’t resist the cute or the light. Maybe he doesn’t want to.

In Nostradamus, though, we get a number of characters that seem only to exist in order to die so that others can have things to think about. The effect of this is the first character/narrator, Cheryl (who is narrating as a dead person, we soon learn), is supposed to set up a backdrop or mood to the novel, but I ended up forgetting her easily. First off, she’s only a ghost, and second she’s so without flaw that she becomes even less real than a ghost. And then, as other characters narrate and either die (physically or emotionally) or otherwise disappear, we’re left only with survivors, namely Reg, who narrated that longish passage above. Reg has for most of the book been an unflinching fundamentalist in his faith, and his section operates mostly as an apology. It’s lovely in places. For so long, the book, for me, seemed to be equating pure faith in a god as purely evil—the way that, with people for whom their god is such an intrinsic part of their self, devotion to that god is little more than selfishness, self-obsession—and but actually I think by the end of the book this remains its message. Reg writes an extended apology, atoning for behavior that has left him lonely and miserable. Coupland’s saying that faith is only good in the service of the self as citizen. Or simply that faith should be a way to come toward others, not pull yourself apart from them.

I have no idea whence the title, though it too is Couplandian. 'Sup, Buddha? would be another obvious choice.