Lured by the combination of a big Helvetica 'A' on a yellow background like a moth to a candle-flame, I bought a hardback copy of Generation A from the lovely London Review bookshop. My purchase was informed by a
certain nostalgic fondness for Generation X, the book that first brought
Coupland to fame in 1991. I remember reading it while helping my dad with the
harvest – an annual summer activity that always involved much time
waiting around in tractor cabs. This memory is actually weirdly appropriate for Gen A, which begins in the cab of a combine harvester in a wheat field in Iowa. Sadly, though, I was in for a big disappointment.
Generation X was good for a number of reasons. The story, such as it was, revolved around three idiosyncratic but profoundly likeable characters who had turned their backs on mainstream American life to live in Palm Springs, California, to work 'McJobs' and tell stories that would somehow invest their lives with meaning. The writing style was simple and direct, the tone wry, cynical, often barbed & the whole thing fizzing with ideas on contemporary culture that were new and strange because it felt like Coupland was articulating them for the first time. Plus the inventiveness extended to the form of the book itself – my copy a sort of strange square-format paperback with room in the margins for a new dictionary containing such phrases as 'Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence' and 'Celebrity schadenfreude: Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths'.
Generation A opens with a quote from Malcolm McLaren, 'Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. Suddenly you've become a novel idea and you've got people wanting to join in. You've gained credibility from nothing. You're the talk of the town. Develop this as a story you can sell.' This seems to me to point at the very outset to the emptiness that is at the heart of this not very good novel; like Coupland himself knows it's the Emperors New Clothes he's selling, but people will keep buying it, so he'll keep writing it. The action is set in the near-future, in a world where bees are thought to have become extinct – except when five young people from different places around the world are stung. This leads to a sort of science-conspiracy thriller plot in which these characters are kidnapped, taken to labs, experimented on, and finally released where they all end up living in a cabin in isolated North Canada. Like in Gen X, they sit around and tell each other stories. But here the problem is that the stories just aren't very good.
I wouldn't say it was completely pointless. There are some odd phrases and ideas in here that are good – one of the characters, Harj, escapes his pursuers & finds sanctuary living with the employees of Abercrombie & Fitch, known only as Craigs, 'Let's kit you out in some pre-distressed waffle-knit Henley shirts'. The consequences to society of the disappearance of bees (something that might well happen, one day) are imaginatively detailed.
But the few good things only serve to sharpen my disappointment in the rest of it. The characters here are so thinly defined (indeed, at the end the central five do actually merge into a single entity), and the plot so fantastic, it's just impossible to care about any of it.
15/50
Cover: I like the simplicity, the shinyness of the spot-laminated A, the Helvetica – a very Coupland-y font. 8/10
Not a patch on the original … still worth reading I'd say.
