Brennan's Reviews > Girlfriend in a Coma

Is it because Coupland also lived in Japan and Hawai'i, makes himself crazy extrapolating what our current patterns of consumption will mean environmentally, or so shrewdly id's, adores and impugns middle class suburban life and its children that make me love his writing? Dunno, but I do. I found the characters in this book fully realized, in some cases tremendously sensual, and in all cases talking about things that I am curious about. Their wistfulness is nearly visceral.

This book blew me away, again articulating what had been my intuited sense of my generation's reality. I still choke up towards the end of Girlfriend in a Coma.

"A thousand years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage... But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because the earth is now totally ours." (p269, hardback)