Generation yay.

I just finished reading Generation A, by Douglas Coupland, and it made me crave apples so bad. We're at the height of the delicious fall fruit harvest here in Ontario, when apples are almost too plentiful. As a gal who has always loved a Yellow Transparent or a Russet, this is one of my favourite times of year. I ate two Honeycrisps before I sat down to write this. It's a good life for us apple-holics these days.

Not so in Coupland's world. The crux of his new novel, which takes place in the not-so-far-off future, is the recent extinction of honey bees, which, of course, means the end of anything that needs to be pollinated, including apple trees. At a few points, one of the main characters describes her love of the Braeburn in juicy, almost porny detail. I salivated, and was embarrassingly aroused, and also terrified at the prospect of a world without my daily staple. Leave it to Coupland to freak me out in such a particular, absurd way.

I've been an obsessive Doug Coupland fangirl since I was a teenager. I devoured Generation X and wrote three book reports on Shampoo Planet and even kind of loved Polaroids from the Dead. Girlfriend in a Coma made me cry and Life After God still remains high on my list of all-time favourite short story collections. (If you haven't read the amazing post-nuclear meltdown "The Wrong Sun" you really probably ought to.) Sometimes I'm not quite sure what he's up to (sorry, but I might be the only person who hated Microserfs) but then he always seems to redeem himself (Terry basically redeems everything). That's why, while Generation A might not be his strongest book, I still loved it, and I'll still always love him. The narrative dropped off into fragments in the final act, which I guess is part of the point--different characters telling their stories, raging against a post-Internet world where human stories have been replaced by digital nightmares. Like always with Coupland, I admire the idea, and even though the execution may be flawed, his writing is as sarcastic and satirical and spot-on as ever. But I guess what I liked about GenA, more than the book itself, is what it represents. GenX was all about the end of culture, the end of personal narratives, the end of history. I used that frigging book as an example in so many poorly articulated essays about postmodernism and the decline of civilization that Baudrillard is rolling over in his grave. It was my go-to for proving that as a poetic, thoughtful society, we were in our twilight hours. And yet, here we are, 18 years later, and Coupland's still cranking out insane, implausible, joke-soaked stories about unbelievable characters in strangely familiar situations. He's lapped himself, and I love it. It gives me hope.

I don't know what else I can say about this, except that this line from GenX is just simple and stupid enough to be totally profound: Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long. Words to live by on an autumn Sunday, although I'm not sure why. See above re. that being the point.

Here's a Sunday night song.