Hey Douglas Coupland!
in September 2003, Brian Draper interviewed Douglas Coupland about his latest novel, Hey Nostradamus!. This text was first published in Church Times on 23/9/03.
Something's on the mind of Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland, as we sit down to talk over a plate of ham sandwiches at the Covent Garden Hotel. And it's not just that the Chinese bankers on the next table are making too much noise.
There's death, for a start, a subject which arises quickly. Last week he found out that a close friend has cancer, and is considering his eulogy already. Meanwhile, his father is due to have open heart surgery in a few days time, which, at 77, is highly risky.
'There's this big shit-storm of death headed my way, whether I like it or not. It's part of being in the world and growing older,' he suggests. But the dark clouds often seem to have silver linings in Coupland's imagination, and he's trying to see them now: 'My family's never been so interesting or kind or nice or talkative. It's been quite wonderful.'
This is also the day his eighth novel, Hey Nostradamus!, is published in the UK. But you don't need a sooth-sayer to predict that it combines his famous cultural awareness with an increasingly large helping of spiritual - and specifically Christian - reflection. This is a man who has been trying earnestly, since the early 1990s, to introduce the Spirit of the Age to the Holy Ghost and get them talking.
His debut novel was the hugely popular and influential Generation X, littered with culture-shaping soundbites such as 'McJob' ('a low-pay, low prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector') and 'Mid-Twenties Breakdown' ('a period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties ... a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world').
It was timed (and almost written) to perfection, and conferred cult status on the author (who is also a sculptor and designer). Slogans printed in the margins of the book resonated with a 'lost generation': 'You might not count in the new world order'; 'Nostalgia is a weapon'; 'Less is a possibility.' Meanwhile, his characters shared stories of what it meant to be twenty-something, raised in the shadow of divorce and the Bomb and 'scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan'.
A swathe of disaffected young people (listening to Nirvana on their Sony Walkmans) sighed in agreement as they identified with a man describing the onset of 'McCulture' - all global brands and themed shopping malls. The world they'd inherited, bereft of transcendence or higher values, was a poisoned chalice of a hand-me-down from the baby-boomer generation.
Coupland has been trying to keep the 'baby busters' thinking - and asking tough questions - ever since.
The church has often used the term 'Generation X' as a catch-all for any young people who don't want to worship with us anymore. It's especially ironic when employed evangelistically (how many articles have now been written on 'Reaching Generation X'?), as Coupland's original inference was that anyone primarily identified as an advertiser's target market is dehumanised in the process.
Those with ears to hear have listened harder to his yearning for hope and redemption beyond our sometimes impersonal and hypocritical institutions and hierarchies. He has certainly touched a powerful nerve for many Christians who are trying to straddle the twin cultures of a church stuck on pause and a world stuck on fast-forward.
His third book, Life After God, explored more explicitly what it meant to be raised without any spiritual guidance or sense of higher purpose. Life After God's crescendo will have been quoted in any culturally savvy church worth its salt and light: 'My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.'
Coupland has seemed on the verge of finding God ever since, especially in his deeply spiritual, pre-millennial tension-filled Girlfriend in a Coma; yet it's a niggling absence - rather than a divine presence - which continues to permeate his work.
In Hey Nostradamus!, he's searching for hope amid the rubble of a post-9/11 world. The trigger point is a Columbine-style massacre in a Vancouver school. Cheryl, a Christian teenager and member of Youth Alive! is killed in a terrifyingly random shooting by three 'gunboys'. Shortly before, she had doodled an epigram - 'God is nowhere. God is now here' - on her school-book, which provides a sense of false significance to those she leaves behind who want desperately to make sense of it all.
The rest of the book traces the effect of that fateful October lunchtime on Cheryl's teenage husband Jason, his (subsequent) partner Heather and his father, Reg. Each takes up the story in turn. Cheryl and Jason were both given strict Christian upbringings, and Coupland charts the effects of Christianity on his characters in parallel with the effects of the shooting.
'I wrote this book to start some sort of dialogue,' he says. 'For me, writing like this is the only way I can send out an SOS to the world. It's a big responsibility.' This is a world without a moral compass, and Coupland keeps returning to Christianity - as a curious onlooker, at least - hoping to find a plausible source of redemption for a spiritually bereft culture. But why Christianity?
'My great-grandparents were all Bible-thumpers going across the Canadian prairies at the turn of the century. I think they were very terse. Independent of ideology, they were crabby and mean and nasty and miserable.'
His grandparents first recoiled, then his parents; and Coupland ended up in a home conspicuously devoid of religion. But he's aware of that absence, and Hey Nostradamus! explores the troublesome and erratic transmission of spiritual values from generation to generation. 'I could be scientific and say that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think there's something about the way we were raised, and I don't know what it is yet, that has brought back all that Bible thumping and whatever into my life.'
As if to ram the point home, there's a thumping quote at the start of the novel from 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: 'Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye...' It's enough to suggest that we're singing from the same hymn sheet.
'It was actually put on the tombstone of a kid who was killed in Columbine,' he explains. 'That passage is saying, you never know when your time is going to come. At any moment, you could commit any sin, but at any moment, transcendence could happen. No matter how, there has to be some form of redemption possible. Without redemption, there is no hope. Without hope you're in hell.'
Seeking reassurance, he asks what I think of his exegesis. But while I struggle to recall the context of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, let alone what the commentators say, he continues:
'In the book, Reg is a horrible, nasty piece of work, but he's the one who's utterly redeemed. Hope comes when it's least likely. What did the Pet Shop Boys say?'
I realise that I've a better chance with 1 Corinthians than Eighties' synth bands.
"Just when you least expect it, just what you least expect." Life is really short.'
Life is short, and so seems our hour together, and Coupland still hasn't really articulated why he's so fascinated, yet so sceptical, about Christianity. Perhaps he never will. He is a writer, not a speaker. An artist, not a theologian. The epigram 'God is nowhere. God is now here' relies on a space for its linguistic impact, and he seems destined for some time to occupy the gap between God's seemingly random presence and absence in a hurting world.
'In my high school, there was this Christian group called Young Life, and they used to have posters up around the school advertising barbeques and roller-skating. So I talked to this girl and said, "That barbecue looks like fun. I'd like to come," and her eyes narrowed and she said, "You can't."
And so I asked someone else, and you could tell they all talked in the interim, and it was like, "No. We collectively reject you."
Oh.
'I realised it's a clique, an oligarchy, a mess. If they'd have been that much nicer to me, my life would be so different right now.'
The soul-destroying pettiness of the young Christians in Hey Nostradamus! begins to make sense. It's a painful representation of the kind of religion that's based more on middle-class values than anything deeper. Coupland can see that there should be more to it than simply whether you go all the way with your girlfriend.
'That's why I'm so pissed off with those youth organisations. They're so elitist, and they're not thinking for themselves. I believe there's something to believe in, and you should always be working toward it, and the moment you stop thinking about it, it's game over. You don't just renegotiate your relationship with God every Sunday, or even every day. Every moment of your life you should be thinking about it.'
Not the first time, Coupland sounds like he has something beyond astute cultural reflection to offer the church at this time. This is a radical call, and one to shame many Christians. It is reminiscent of what he writes at the end of Girlfriend in a Coma, in a bout of unbridled optimism that acknowledges the potential for a small band of disciples to change the world for good:
'Every cell in our body explodes with truth... We'll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We'll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world. We will change our minds and souls from stone and plastic into linen and gold - that's what I believe.'
But before we can burst into a rendition of Amazing Grace, there sounds a note of caution.
He sighs. 'I just can't bring myself to be part of the revival tent. There's so much abuse or corruption. You can make any word or passage of the Bible mean whatever you say. It's so binary: it's like, you're either with us or against us. There's going to be a mass abandonment.'
But not every Christian or church thinks and acts like that, I explain. Surely, as a genuine searcher, he's aware of that? Does he know there are creative, inclusive communities out there which are modelling a better way, however fallibly?
'The Christian church seems to be splitting in two and half of it is going to be the old way, the other half of it will be the new way, or the third way, or whatever. I don't know how it's going to happen, or who's going to lead it.'
He's not throwing his own hat into the ring, however. Coupland is 41, and the man who famously felt the pulse of a generation is still looking for a prognosis. But he's always written from a personal perspective, and there are new things to come to terms with now. After all, he's no longer growing up, but growing older.
'What I've noticed is that around 40 (it doesn't matter what you do - whether you're an LA movie producer or a housewife in Denmark), you realise that's as far as your life is going to go.
'In a lot of senses, your life is over, and that's a very difficult thing for people to confront. I think that's why a lot of people turn to drink and drugs. They hit that wall. And you realise that there's nothing planetary that can take you beyond it. What is there?'
There's always Jesus, I think to myself, who is quite central to the Christian faith, who has paid a high price already for those born into a consumer culture... I'm tempted to suggest that although God sometimes seems absent when it matters most, Jesus embraced such absence himself when he died so that we might live 'life to the full'. Even beyond 40.
But I don't. It's time to let him go to Nottingham for another sell-out stop on his literary tour. And anyway, how can you say something without it sounding like a hard sell? He is not a target market.
In the meantime, the searching goes on; and the SOS signal will be hurled out to our culture, in his words, 'like the RKO Theatre throwing out lightening bolts...'
'The process continues. Maybe it is my life's work; but if you'd told me 12 years ago that this is what I'd be doing, and this is how I'd be doing it, I'd never have believed it. Things change so quickly.'
They certainly do, and in the face of his latest book's emptiness, absence and loss, a parable comes like one of those RKO bolts from the blue. It's a crack of light in the darkness. Is someone, in the end, looking out for us?
'There has to be hope. There just has to be. Even if it takes the most tortured and bizarre twist possible. There has to be hope. And the hope has to come from believing in God or living for something higher.'
And with that, he gazes down at the ham he never got to touch, and admits that he's struggling with the idea of eating meat right now. Is that what's been on his mind all along? God knows. But as we head for the exit, he thinks aloud again, and speaks words that come almost directly from Reg, that nasty, horrible piece of work who so unexpectedly finds redemption.
'The thing with animals is that they are part of the world, but they're also part of God, and we're not. I think animals and birds have souls, but their fate is not in question. They're still back in the garden. They never left.'
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