Bitter fate and battered souls

Hey Nostradamus!

A Novel

Douglas Coupland

Bloomsbury: 248 pp., $21.95

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It isn’t easy for a young writer to be viewed as a spokesman for his generation -- even if, as Douglas Coupland did with “Generation X,” he labeled himself and his demographic cohort. Coupland’s latest novel, “Hey Nostradamus!” proves he’s bearing up under this burden just fine.

Coupland isn’t as young as he used to be, and the Xers, like every previous generation, have had to grow up, lower their expectations and make sense of grief. This, in fact, is the theme of “Hey Nostradamus!” -- a tone-perfect black comedy set in Coupland’s native Vancouver, Canada, that focuses on a high school massacre much like the Columbine shootings in Colorado.

The novel has four parts of unequal length, each narrated by a different character. In the first part, which will remind readers of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” 17-year-old Cheryl Anway goes to school in 1988 with a mission: to tell her boyfriend, Jason Klaasen, that she’s pregnant. Three other students have a more sinister mission: Wearing camouflage fatigues, packing rifles and shotguns, they use the cafeteria lunch crowd for target practice. Cheryl is the last of dozens killed.

Actually, Cheryl and Jason are married. (They flew secretly to Las Vegas.) But in the campus church group to which both belong, their sexual relationship is a scandal. Cheryl, who has no religious background, joined the group simply to snag Jason, who joined under pressure from his bigoted father, Reg, and his model older brother, Kent. Ironically, it’s Cheryl who experiences conversion. Of all the novel’s professing Christians, only she is the real deal.

“To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition,” Cheryl says from beyond the grave, hearing the mournful and angry prayers of survivors and the public. “I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there -- God, and sorrow and its acceptance.”

In the popular imagination, Cheryl’s notebook doodlings -- GOD IS NOWHERE / GOD IS NOW HERE -- are inflated into an affirmation of faith, but the media are less kind to Jason, who narrates the second part. At first, because he brained one of the student gunmen with a rock, he’s considered a hero. But later -- think of Richard Jewell and the Atlanta Olympics bombing -- he’s suspected of being the mastermind of the plot. Cheryl’s parents turn against him viciously, and he has to leave town.

In 1999, back in Vancouver, Jason is damaged goods. He lives alone, abuses alcohol and drugs, suffers blackouts, does odd jobs for a building contractor. He can find no meaning in Cheryl’s death or in subsequent tragedies -- Kent has been killed in a car crash. Jason sits in his truck with his dog and writes his account of the massacre for the future edification of Kent’s twin sons. As he brings his story up to date, it gets weirder and funnier: encounters with Russian gangsters, a second secret marriage.

In 2002, a later girlfriend of Jason’s, a court stenographer named Heather, narrates the third part. Jason, the only romance in Heather’s lonely life -- and even then, she had to fight a losing battle with the memory of Cheryl -- has disappeared. A psychic contacts her, channeling messages that Jason, dead or alive, has sent. The messages refer to things only he and Heather knew about, so they must be genuine, even though the psychic seems fake and extorts money from Heather.

Her only comfort comes from an unexpected source: Jason’s father, Reg, who narrates the fourth part in 2003. The loss of both sons, and of his wife to drink and dementia, has finally shocked Reg into a semblance of humanity. Jason always viewed him as a monster. Now Reg, recognizing that he was a monster, ceases to be one. He has been a religious bully to quiet his own doubts. Now, forced to admit those doubts, he’s open to the first faint stirrings of something like faith.

Reg, of course, isn’t part of Generation X. But his pre-boomer attitudes mesh with those of Coupland’s younger characters. As the shock from the massacre spreads out and weakens over the years -- as the absurd yet bloodily realistic scene in the cafeteria, rendered from several points of view in a brilliant display of cinematic jump-cutting, subsides into quieter forms of craziness -- all these people turn inward. Spirituality replaces politics -- a trend that underlies much recent history in the United States as well as in Canada.

Jason couldn’t care less about the teen gunmen’s motivations. They are simply losers. And Heather, after years of transcribing the testimony of criminals and sleazy businessmen, has given up on the very idea of justice. “Rich people have their own laws,” she says. “Poor people don’t stand a chance; they never have.” At least on this side of the grave.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

From ‘Hey Nostradamus!’

My father was an angry man, you know that, but he was also a man of little faith, constantly angry because -- because why? Because he took over his father’s daffodil farm and forfeited whatever life he might have created for himself. My father was fierce, and I was fierce with you, Jason, and when I became fierce with you, I was appalled yet unable to stop myself.

My fierceness with you came not from any desire to copy my father, but instead from my desire to be his opposite, to be righteous, and to be strong where my own father was weak. My piety galled him, and when he was furious, I was driven out of the house and fields ... out into the forest, away from home, for hours, sometimes days (yes, I ran away from home) spent contemplating a God who would create an animal like my father, a religious man without faith. A fake man -- a human form containing nothing.

I never told you about my childhood. Why would I have?