Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland, is a strange story, haunting and thought-provoking, that somehow fell short in the end. It is the story of a group of friends stumbling through life, each searching for something but none sure exactly what.

Although, that’s not quite true; of the seven friends, only five are stumbling. Karen is in a coma and has been for many years. Jared is dead. Karen has seen something she’s not supposed to have seen: the end of the world. Jared knows more than he is telling.

Years pass. Richard is pretty much absent from life, waiting for Karen’s return. The other four friends are adrift as the world accelerates around them. One night twenty years later Richard manages to spend an evening thinking about someone other than Karen. The next morning he is alone and knows with absolute certainty the moment she awakes. At first, not even Karen knows that her awakening is the final trumpet that marks the apocalypse.

One of the parts of the book that resonated best with me was how people were eager to show her the advances of the last twenty years, and her reaction to them. Cell phones, the Internet, and so forth. She comments that everyone seems so proud that things have become so much more efficient, as if that were the goal that humanity had set out for itself. She senses that what little soul was left in humanity when she went into the coma is lost.

I coined a phrase for that a while back, while mulling world politics at a Killing Joke concert. Jazz Coleman was discussing the fall of the American Empire. “Sure,” I thought to myself. “America will someday collapse (not nearly as soon as Mr. Coleman thinks), and it will collapse bigger, better, faster, and louder than any empire has ever collapsed before. It’s the American way.”

BiggerBetterFasterLouder. It’s a fairly easy trend to spot. But is BiggerBetterFasterLouder by definition also emptier? Ultimately, what’s wrong with BiggerBetterFasterLouder? I think there’s an answer to that, but there’s such an entrenched assumption that BBFL is bad that it’s difficult to discuss why. Our pursuit of BBFL has us racking up massive deficits — financial, environmental, and human — and that has to mean something, but is that an indictment on BBFL, or our shortsighted way of pursuing it? Is it possible to imagine a society that pursues BiggerBetterFasterLouder in a far-sighted, responsible way? Maybe, but I suspect not a society composed of humans. That’s more about humans than BBFL, though.

It’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the world ends in the course of the story; Jared tells you so right there in chapter one. Since he’s dead, he’s a pretty credible witness. What would you do if you were one of less than ten people left on the planet? Would you focus on survival, on forgetting the world, or would you wonder why me? Probably all of those, from time to time. What happens later when the teacher comes back to collect the test and you’ve just been doodling in the margins?

All good questions. I wrote in the opening sentence that the story fell short in the end. It’s an intangible thing; by the numbers it’s just the sort of story I like — character driven, thought-provoking, an ending that decisively concludes an episode but leaves a lot of open questions — but the numbers only go so far. If i had to put my finger on one thing, it’s that there are a couple of people who experience staggeringly painful situations at the end, and I just didn’t feel it. When you’re writing about humanity’s loss of an emotional foundation, that’s no time to hold back.

Still and all, though, it was a good read. I went through it pretty fast, and there was never any doubt that I was going to finish the book. Lots of mystery, and a nice look at Modern Life through twenty-year-long binoculars. (Thirty-year-long binoculars, now.) You could do a lot worse.

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I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the things I like about Japanese storytelling is that there is a difference between an end and a conclusion. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is an excellent example of that approach. There is an end. Things have changed, what was will never be again. The universe has moved on. Those who are left, however, are still living in a mysterious world where the only thing you can trust is your own love for others.

This story is populated with interesting people, people capable of causing great harm or bringing great joy. Toru finds himself at the center of a world of people who are damaged somehow, injured by some sort of taint on the world, and he has somehow become their champion against a darkness that defies definition. The darkness has a name, though — Noboru Wataya, the name of Toru’s cat and of his brother-in-law.

Fundamentally, the story is a simple one, Toru’s struggle to bring his wife back into his world, to rescue her from the world of her older brother. The struggle itself is anything but simple, however, as mystical forces swirl around Toru and gradually draw him in.

Meanwhile the past is looking over Toru’s shoulder, looming over everything, a sense that something was set in motion a generation ago that is now twisting events for its own purposes. There is an old army officer, who was on a covert mission in Mongolia in the 1930’s. Things were looking bad when another member of his team said, with absolute certainty, that he would die in Japan, and in fact he would outlive the prophet. In that moment the soldier knew the prophesy to be true, but while he survived incredible trials for decades afterward, the knowledge that he would survive, the knowledge of the moment he should have died, renders him a hollow shell, walking dead. It is something of a relief to him, I think, when the prophet finally dies, and death is once more a possibility for him. Under that shadow he is finally able to care for others once more.

There’s a lot of that stuff. Many people are in search of redemption, and each has to find their own path to it. In the center, unwittingly, unwillingly, is Mr. Wind-Up Bird, a quiet man who would rather let troubles blow over than meet them head-on. A guy who likes his routine but doesn’t really know where he fits in the world, yet he carries a quiet conviction that we all wish we had. In a world that is progressively more confusing, he knows just one thing. He wants his wife back, and he’ll do anything to save her from the darkness. Even kill.

Layers, textures, characters, this is some darn good storytelling. Read this book.

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Carlucci’s Edge by Richard Paul Russo is a detective story set in a grim, futuristic San Francisco. Modern society is collapsing, yet at the same time technology has continued to advance. Against that backdrop Lieutenant Carlucci must find the connection between a series of seemingly unrelated murders. Along the way he meets a handful of interesting characters who are also caught up in the events.

The prose is concise and very readable, tight and to the point, making it easy to keep turning the pages. The characters are generally believable (but not universally), and the author does a good job at times portraying their emotions. He uses “business” a lot (fiddling with coffee cups is a favorite) to control the pacing of conversations, and that works pretty well, but sometimes I found it overdone. (Note to self…)

Overall, I enjoyed the book quite a lot. I found myself, however, glancing at how much of the book was left and wondering how the story was going to fit in the remaining pages. It wasn’t that the characters weren’t making progress, it was that there was no increase in tension as they got closer to the truth. The bad guys who were willing to kill to protect their secrets at the start don’t seem to be very active as the good guys close in. The ending itself, while far more realistic that most things you will find in this genre, lacked the punch I expect in a novel of this sort. Perhaps the problem was in my own expectations.

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Right now I am reading John Irving’s second published novel, The Water-Method Man. The central point of view is that of Fred ‘Bogus’ Trumper, his nickname well-earned through the countless lies he has used to pave his life. He has lied about mundane and inconsequential shit for so long that when the extraordinary happens, when defining moments occur, no one believes him. But in this self-appraisal that slides easily from first person to third, from present to past, we must admit that while Bogus is an accomplished liar, a man adept at verbal sleight of hand, a captain of obfuscation, he is honest with himself.

Bogus, it seems, works for an independent movie company in search of a project. His boss has decided that Bogus will be the subject of the next film. The name of the film: Fucking Up.

As I read about Bogus I feel the Bogus in my soul, and I wonder how I managed to go so many years without fucking up (more than I did). Recently I’ve reclaimed the Bogus, grasped my God-given ability to fuck up, clinging to what must be a basic human right the way a rodeo rider holds the rope tied around the neck of the angry bull beneath him. The beast is quivering with rage, wanting nothing more than to send me to the dirt and put a hoof between my shoulder blades. In rodeo it’s eight seconds. In not fucking up, it’s a lifetime. For a long time I was doing a good job not fucking up, except now it feels like the whole time I was fucking up.

I’ve not read anything by John Irving that I didn’t like, but I have to say that there’s something in Setting Free the Bears and The Water Method Man that resonates better with me than his later works. Bears has some rough spots that I’m sure Irving would like another go at, but the voice is there. It’s a great double-feature with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a lesson in Czech history on top. (I was not living here when I read the story, but it did inform my perception of the country.)

Maybe it’s Irving fighting against the pulp establishment, but in this story and in A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I also recently read, he has gone out of his way to say, during the course of the novel, that there will not be a definitive end. It may be in his other stories as well, but I wasn’t looking for it back then. Now that I’m aware of it, it seems a bit unnatural, a self-justification where one isn’t necessary. Either you understand or you don’t. Either you like questions or you like answered questions. With Irving there is no happily ever after, there’s just ‘and then we all kept on’, or, ‘and then I continued on the vector of my life, a tightrope act with despair on the right side of my balancing pole, and reckless optimism on the left. Ahead are the other acrobats, waving me on, beckoning to me, and on that narrow path true redemption and true damnation both lie.’

Irving’s gonna wish he said that.

Stories don’t end. Episodes might come to a close with a boom or a sigh, but the story continues. The brilliance of Owen Meany is not the grand convergence of Owen’s knowledge of what is to come, it is about the hinted, not ever written and perhaps periodic reclamation of the narrators soul, his return to the passion of teaching. Irving has a way with words, spare except when he isn’t.

Cells divide and sperm meets ovum. The sperm come carrying heavy suitcases, and the ova have baggage of their own. Somewhere in this convergence of crap is the magic we call life.

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