Though the title inevitably evokes the classic Smiths song this novel is quite literally centers around a main character's girlfriend who falls into a coma. Though this seemingly mundane premise quickly turns interesting when said coma is the catalyst for a post-apocalyptic world in either instance this particular novel seemed a strange choice for an undergraduate religion class.
I first read this novel as an assigned text in Dr. Harrison's lower division Christian Tradition class and amidst a slew of other religious/philosophical texts this seemed a very odd choice. In some ways I feel that pedagogical choices like these probably contributed to Dr. Harrison's limited presence on campus in subsequent semesters (the guy somehow managed to eek discussions of The Matrix into a class focused on the development of later Christian religious philosophy...seriously).
To summarize, Girlfriend in a Coma tells the story of a group of mediocre high school students, one of whom falls into a coma after overdosing on Ecstasy the night after losing her virginity and conceiving a child with her jock boyfriend. Years later after each member of this group of friends has been partway down the road into mundane lives the girlfriend wakes up at the same moment of an unspecified apocalyptic event that leaves the very same group of friends (including the coma-delivered daughter of the eponymous girlfriend) the only survivors on earth. Though apparently the last humans left on the planet this group of now thirty-somethings proceeds to simply survive in an unremarkable and rarely commendable fashion. Most of the hard questions of the novel are asked directly by the ghostly narrator, a high-school classmate and football jock (hardly a likable character but somehow his death gives him the perspective to put the philosophical screw to his former friends), questions which ultimately amount to: what does it take for one to want to live remarkably.
Now I won't be the one to say that the question Coupland poses is invalid or even dismissible. In our media-saturated and leisure-oriented culture I would hope that even more people were willing to answer the call to live remarkable lives. But for some reason the context in which this novel was presented sidelined the question. Admittedly Girlfriend in a Coma is not a novel I would have ever picked up but for some reason attempting to appropriate a secular perspective on finding meaning and purpose in one's life to a Christian context somehow seemed like a backwards move. As a result the novel led me further into musings on post-apocalyptic narratives than existentialistic introspection.
Modern media has no lack of exploration into post-apocalyptic narratives. Indeed Hollywood has been dreaming up new approaches from Mad Max to Waterworld to I Am Legend (though this last started in comic form). Literature has been considering the same concept since Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All of these narratives leave us with a more general question that Coupland seems to ask, which is: if we are stripped of everything we know, what do we do? Think about it...what each of these narratives have in common is the complete removal of the character from all social, economic, sanitary, gastronomic, etc. norms that we in our civilized and industrialized societies are able to accept as consistent realities. But if everyone but you and a few others in the world were dead, contaminated, or simply disappeared what would it all mean and what would you do?
Even after providing for basic survival (made particularly difficult without electricity, running water, gasoline, or fresh food) the next mental void to fill is to make that very same survival justifiable on an existential level. With a constant social network it is easy for us to find meaning and importance even in the most mundane of tasks (doing dishes, depositing paychecks, writing blogs, etc.) because even such minuscule acts represent a re-validation of an individual's existence since the effects of these acts is perceived by others from without the individual. Conversely, in a post-apocalyptic world with no apparent hope of global reconstruction the weight of solitude on our vast, spinning rock-in-space is likely to make any lone individual either commit suicide for the sheer futility of continued existence or simply relapse to a hedonistic and short-sighted manner of existence. In Coupland's novel it is the latter which his characters pursue and if you think about it it is difficult to blame them despite the fact that the author does. But the reason for this may be the fact that he offers the prospect of redemption via a magical jump back in time to the narrative's catalyst (the coma-event). Of course in retrospect all characters have the perspective to pursue wildly different and philosophically informed and significant lives (which seems to be Coupland's point throughout). But I have to feel somewhat cheated by this particular deus-ex-machina since a regression to a more primitive survivalist mindset is probably the only way to mentally cope with the essential end of life on earth that post-apocalyptic narratives depict.
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Coupland, Douglas. Girlfriend in a Coma. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.
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