Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Scribner (2010), Paperback, 320 pages
Description
Set in the near future world where all bees are extinct when 5 unconnected people from varying parts of world are each stung. Their experience unites them in ways they could not have imagined.
Media reviews
Still, the plot of Generation A, which in another writer’s hands might gallop into geopolitical-thriller territory, plays harmony to trademark Couplandian insight: As Diana is taken away from her house, now covered in an isolation bubble, she says “For the first time in my life, the future felt
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futuristic”; for Julien, the sting took away a life “like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up.” It’s in these details, not the overall picture, that readers will find the generation of which Vonnegut spoke, though as with Coupland’s Generation X, it isn’t a complete portrait. An initially puzzling backdrop gives the narrative just enough momentum to nose these characters into a place where they can explore how much they have in common. Show Less
If Generation X gave us “tales for an accelerated culture,” then Generation A is its natural extension, offering tales for the information overloaded. The bite-sized chapters and witty tone will appeal to those with perpetual attention defi cits, and bits of pop culture sprinkled liberally
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throughout will attract readers highly attuned to the current zeitgeist. Coupland clearly understands the minds of the current generation – young people who have never known a time without the Internet – and plays on their desire to jump continually from one subject to the next. Show Less
Generation A feels like a slow-motion demonstration of the ways in which technology is destroying story, and not the enacted triumph of story over technology that Coupland so clearly wishes it to be.
User reviews
LibraryThing member reluctantm
So Douglas Coupland is always about shtick and by the end of the book, the shtick was wearing thin on me. He's always interesting to read, but after I finished I wanted to say: Hey, if you want to write microfiction stories, just put out a book of microfiction stories, don't try to gussy it up by
That said, I did read the book and enjoy it for the most part. I just couldn't shake the feeling that Douglas Coupland felt we couldn't figure out some of the story on our own and so there were parts where I felt like I was being lectured rather than I was reading a story.
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putting a narrative to weave them all together. Essentially, the entire last half of the book is just short (like 500 words) stories. I didn't need the characters to try and tell me how these stories all relate. I could figure it out on my own. That said, I did read the book and enjoy it for the most part. I just couldn't shake the feeling that Douglas Coupland felt we couldn't figure out some of the story on our own and so there were parts where I felt like I was being lectured rather than I was reading a story.
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LibraryThing member KevinRubin
I just read “Generation A” by Douglas Coupland and I’m not sure what I think of it. I’ve read most of Coupland’s books over the years, but having just finished this one I think it’s the only one I haven’t really enjoyed.
The book takes place in a not too distant future where all the
The government swoops in and takes each them to a separate research facility to see what about them might’ve drawn bees that were thought to be extinct.
I started to finally get into the story at the point were each of the five was in their isolated research facility, and through their being released and getting back home.
But then researchers decide to put the five of them together in one place, where they have to make up and tell stories to one another. I didn’t enjoy most of those stories, as the characters were not written to be very good storytellers, and I don’t feel like Coupland pulled off the stories-within-the-story thing, not with interesting stories.
While I like most of Coupland’s books, this one just didn’t do it for me.
The book takes place in a not too distant future where all the
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bees have died or disappeared, affecting flowers and crops and things. Life for people seems not too greatly different than we have now, but things like fresh fruit are a rarity. The story follows five youngish people from different parts of the world who’ve each been stung by a bee.The government swoops in and takes each them to a separate research facility to see what about them might’ve drawn bees that were thought to be extinct.
I started to finally get into the story at the point were each of the five was in their isolated research facility, and through their being released and getting back home.
But then researchers decide to put the five of them together in one place, where they have to make up and tell stories to one another. I didn’t enjoy most of those stories, as the characters were not written to be very good storytellers, and I don’t feel like Coupland pulled off the stories-within-the-story thing, not with interesting stories.
While I like most of Coupland’s books, this one just didn’t do it for me.
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LibraryThing member suetu
What’s the buzz?
I can’t say that I’ve loved every word Douglas Coupland’s ever written, but by and large I enjoy his work quite a lot. His novels are observant, quirky, and very funny. So, I was looking forward to Generation A. And I enjoyed reading it, but I wanted to like it so much more
The novel is primarily told from the points of view of five individuals from five different lifestyles and countries. What bonds them is that they all share an extraordinary experience. They are each stung by a bee—at a time (roughly the year 2024) when no one’s seen a bee for five or six years. They’ve long been assumed extinct, and the world suffers for it. Fruits and flowers are incredibly rare, and must be labor-intensively hand pollinated. Honey is like gold. The bees are essentially the canaries in our coal mine, and the future isn’t looking too bright.
This is so much an issue, that there’s a new, hyper-addictive drug on the market called Solon. It keeps users in the present, instead of all that pesky worrying about the future. It also makes time pass quicker and helps alleviate loneliness, so that users can “live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.” So, it is in this near future that Zack from Iowa, Samantha from New Zealand, Julien from Paris, Harj from Sri Lanka, and Diana from Canada become instant worldwide celebrities—and subjects of scientific scrutiny.
And I was really engaged in this somewhat bizarre story. I was totally digging it! But as things moved forward, the plot veered off into left field. For reasons I won’t get into, the B5 (as they are called) spend the second half of the novel telling each other quirky stories they’ve made up. Very little happens as a series of sometimes charming short stories are recited, and the ideas behind Coupland’s satire are driven home.
Eventually there are revelations that somewhat tie the two halves of the novel together, but I found the ending to be weird and somewhat grotesque. There were definitely pleasures to be had in the reading of this novel. Coupland’s just too darn good for that not to be the case, but Generation A never quite came together as a cohesive work.
I can’t say that I’ve loved every word Douglas Coupland’s ever written, but by and large I enjoy his work quite a lot. His novels are observant, quirky, and very funny. So, I was looking forward to Generation A. And I enjoyed reading it, but I wanted to like it so much more
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than I did. I think my biggest problem is that I felt like I was reading two different books. The first half of this novel did not seem to match up with the second.The novel is primarily told from the points of view of five individuals from five different lifestyles and countries. What bonds them is that they all share an extraordinary experience. They are each stung by a bee—at a time (roughly the year 2024) when no one’s seen a bee for five or six years. They’ve long been assumed extinct, and the world suffers for it. Fruits and flowers are incredibly rare, and must be labor-intensively hand pollinated. Honey is like gold. The bees are essentially the canaries in our coal mine, and the future isn’t looking too bright.
This is so much an issue, that there’s a new, hyper-addictive drug on the market called Solon. It keeps users in the present, instead of all that pesky worrying about the future. It also makes time pass quicker and helps alleviate loneliness, so that users can “live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.” So, it is in this near future that Zack from Iowa, Samantha from New Zealand, Julien from Paris, Harj from Sri Lanka, and Diana from Canada become instant worldwide celebrities—and subjects of scientific scrutiny.
And I was really engaged in this somewhat bizarre story. I was totally digging it! But as things moved forward, the plot veered off into left field. For reasons I won’t get into, the B5 (as they are called) spend the second half of the novel telling each other quirky stories they’ve made up. Very little happens as a series of sometimes charming short stories are recited, and the ideas behind Coupland’s satire are driven home.
Eventually there are revelations that somewhat tie the two halves of the novel together, but I found the ending to be weird and somewhat grotesque. There were definitely pleasures to be had in the reading of this novel. Coupland’s just too darn good for that not to be the case, but Generation A never quite came together as a cohesive work.
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LibraryThing member ironicqueery
Douglas Coupland's newest book, Generation A, tell the story of and through five individuals who are stung by bees, bees that have been thought to have died out.
The book is a bit slow to start, as Coupland takes turn rotating through the five individuals, who each narrate their own scenario
Part of this revelation comes through them each telling fictional stories to each other. While the stories are interesting, it does create a disjointed experience for the reader which is hard to follow.
The conclusion then comes at warp speed, ending the book at a much faster pace than the buildup. What results is a book that is good, of course. It's Douglas Coupland and he doesn't really write a bad novel. It's a great story, but compared to his other books, there could have been improvements. It possesses a lot of philosophical ideas, but they aren't as fleshed out as they should be. The book clocks in at 320 pages, but I don't think Coupland should have done this story in less than 420. Of course, being such a Coupland fan, perhaps a bit of that is simply remorse that another book of his is done, and now the wait for the next commences.
The book is a bit slow to start, as Coupland takes turn rotating through the five individuals, who each narrate their own scenario
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explaining how they got stung by a bee. The story picks up as we learn how they are isolated and kept apart from society as they are studied. Then they are rejoined and the mystery of why their were stung and the aftermath is slowly revealed. Part of this revelation comes through them each telling fictional stories to each other. While the stories are interesting, it does create a disjointed experience for the reader which is hard to follow.
The conclusion then comes at warp speed, ending the book at a much faster pace than the buildup. What results is a book that is good, of course. It's Douglas Coupland and he doesn't really write a bad novel. It's a great story, but compared to his other books, there could have been improvements. It possesses a lot of philosophical ideas, but they aren't as fleshed out as they should be. The book clocks in at 320 pages, but I don't think Coupland should have done this story in less than 420. Of course, being such a Coupland fan, perhaps a bit of that is simply remorse that another book of his is done, and now the wait for the next commences.
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LibraryThing member StephenBarkley
Generation A is the story of how five young people’s lives become entangled after being stung by almost extinct bees. The plot’s little more than a vehicle to relate the meta-narrative of life in crumbling future. In the book, each of the five characters take time telling mini-stories which
The title of the book is an obvious nod to his brilliant Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I was expecting the same piercing insight on the current generation that he offered to us Gen Xers a couple decades ago. Unfortunately, Coupland did little more than transplant the Generation X mindset into younger bodies.
In the end, there was too much plot to consider this a mere social commentary, but not enough plot to make a 300 page book very interesting. I’ve read everything that Coupland’s published, and would have to encourage a Coupland-virgin to begin elsewhere.
(If you are new to Coupland, start with Girlfriend in a Coma or Hey Nostradamus!.)
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swirl thematically around this central thought: life is 95% suck and 5% hope.The title of the book is an obvious nod to his brilliant Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I was expecting the same piercing insight on the current generation that he offered to us Gen Xers a couple decades ago. Unfortunately, Coupland did little more than transplant the Generation X mindset into younger bodies.
In the end, there was too much plot to consider this a mere social commentary, but not enough plot to make a 300 page book very interesting. I’ve read everything that Coupland’s published, and would have to encourage a Coupland-virgin to begin elsewhere.
(If you are new to Coupland, start with Girlfriend in a Coma or Hey Nostradamus!.)
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LibraryThing member miranda_d
As always, Douglas Coupland presents us with an interesting novel inhabited by unusual charactors and only semi-improbable plot lines. This futuristic tale about a societey plagued with problems stemming from the disappearance of bees is at times entertaining, engrossing, and laugh out loud funny,
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but there is a deja-vu-ness about this novel. As we're first introduced to the main charactors (the B5s) there was a vague sense of recognition from other Coupland novels ... almost as though we've seen them somewhere, but we never get a full enough picture of them to remember exactly where we know them from. Not that these slightly recycled charactors aren't charming and interesting in their own right, but you get the feeling that it has all kind of been done before. Nowhere in the story do you not think, 'oh this exactly what I would expect from a Coupland novel'. Which might be wonderful if you're a huge fan of Douglas Coupland, but it's slightly more disappointing if you're simply a fan of original writing. Show Less
LibraryThing member gbsallery
I'm not certain, but I think this book would have merited five stars if it had a slightly denser texture. That said, it is a tour de force of self-consciously modern literary form; a novel about stories and the collapse of society, lovingly kneaded to form rich satisfying self-referential loops.
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There are also bees, though their motives remain unclear. Show Less
LibraryThing member Cecilturtle
Apart from a few good quotes, this is an amalgam of crazy characters with unlikely traits living outlandish scenarios. And for what? Yet another diatribe against large pharmaceutical companies, human greed, ecological disasters? Themes du jour to be sure, but they've been treated by others and in a
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much more comprehensive and creative way. This book just bored me. Only Harj grabbed my attention, but he alone could not save the book. Show Less
LibraryThing member gmendonca79
I am a big fan of Douglas Coupland - he might be one of those authors future generations will refer to when describing our times, our anxieties and hopes. I expected "Generation A" to be connected to "Generation X", in the same way J-Pod" and "Microserfs" somehow dialogue between them. But the
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title is a mere disguise - "Generation A" is not a sequel to "Generation X", but an independent, touching novel that reflects upon the basis of our societies. It really poses the question: what ARE the basis of our society? What brought us together in this way and not any other? As is his other novels, the questionings may be hard to be faced with, but the directions Coupland points as possibles answers are always full of hope and a deep faith in Humanity. "Generation A" is fun to read - I really caught myself laughing out loud sometimes. It might be even taken as a light reading, but it makes one reflect on many aspects of our time and life. Show Less
LibraryThing member shannonkearns
a fantastic read. set in the future when bees have become extinct, what happens when five seemingly random people from all over the world get stung within days of each other? a powerful narrative about connection, stories, and what it means to not be alone.
LibraryThing member metamariposa
I suppose it's no surprise that I loved this novel; anything pulls together fundamentalist Christian oddities, anti-poverty observations, and anti-cheap corn/Monsanto imagery in the first five pages is bound to appeal to me. Allusions to many other works I love--the internet, Brave New World,
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media-created phenomenon of H1N1--and allegories of loneliness make this book humorous and appealing to my demographic. (This book strikes me more as allegory than actual Science Fiction; I don't think he's trying to create any illusion of the world described really being an Other from our world right now.) But as the book develops (spoiler alerts) Coupland moves into profound reflections on the place of story and narrative within our world. At the end of the book, as the characters comment on the individualism and alienation from community created in the process of novel-reading, I was squirming uncomfortably as my husband asked me questions that I couldn't answer because I was involved in my own little world in the book. What I love about this book is that it brings in the meta-questions without diminishing the importance of the just plain questions--why are the bees dying? Why don't we want to make communities anymore? How can we stop Monsanto? The questions of "What does novel-reading do to us?" and "Is that important or even a good thing?" are not elevated (theory-style) above the content questions and the skewering of corporate culture. I also finished the book in two days and enjoyed every page-turning minute of it. I found Generation A much more readable and intelligent than The Gum Thief; this novel will give me mental floss for weeks. Show Less
LibraryThing member michaeldwebb
This is a difficult review. The things is, I just love Coupland's writing, and because of that I enjoyed this more than anything I've read since, well, Coupland's last novel. But this was actually a little odd. The first half was wonderful, classic Coupland, a great story about life after bees,
But all the same, beautifully written, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved every sentence of it. But I'm a bit of a fanboy here, so what do I know?
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great characters, his usual brilliant turn of phase. And then... well, it kind of fell apart. It moved into Gum Thief territory, with the characters telling a succession of deliberately oddly /badlywritten stories (similar to Glove Pond in Gum Thief). And then the ending was just a bit daft.But all the same, beautifully written, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved every sentence of it. But I'm a bit of a fanboy here, so what do I know?
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LibraryThing member chrystal
I LOVED this book. Unlike anything I have read before. I found it crass, hilarious, inspiring. A drug that makes you feel like you've read 1000 books? Fabulous. The gross jello-like reproduction of the characters cells- wow. Oral storytelling to bring people together! Both personally, and as a
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librarian, I thought this book was perfect. Show Less
LibraryThing member benedetto.fiorelli
I have read most of Coupland book and this was the most disorienting. In some of his books the characters are almost anonymous puppets whose mixed actions and stories will end up describing a realistic but very humorous picture of the 'human condition', a la Vonnegut. In others of his books the
But the A generation has its birth in a moment of history when human kind has lost the capability of living stories.
So, Coupland has to adopt a stratagem in order to story-tell the generation of humans with non stories and the uncertainty in their future. The stratagem is an injection of fantasy / science fiction that goes a bit out of control and will leave the readers a bit confused at the end.
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strategy is inverted and there are fragmented anonymous stories that will together give a vivid description of the characters and their most inner pains. But the A generation has its birth in a moment of history when human kind has lost the capability of living stories.
So, Coupland has to adopt a stratagem in order to story-tell the generation of humans with non stories and the uncertainty in their future. The stratagem is an injection of fantasy / science fiction that goes a bit out of control and will leave the readers a bit confused at the end.
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LibraryThing member JenMDB
Stronger start than any other Douglas Coupland novel I've read but a classic Coupland finish. Interesting ideas about life without bees.
LibraryThing member bookwormteri
Bees are extinct. Five people from around the world get stung by "extinct" bees and are promptly placed under sterile watch so scientists can figure out why the bees stung them. What makes them different? Once released, the five meet under "scientific" supervision and tell stories...
LibraryThing member newskepticx
I haven't read Coupland in almost a year so I forgot how delightfully weird his books are. But they are strange in way that is completely normal to the Couplandverse. Very interesting theme of the importance of storytelling and our need for stories as human beings.
LibraryThing member yougotamber
What a fantastic read this was. Funny, this book reminded me of Chuck Pahalniuk's "Haunted" because it had the same format (stories within the story). Comparing the two... Coupland far surpassed that of Pahalniuk. I probably feel a connection to the book because it brought up many ideas and
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thoughts about reading itself, it really had me thinking. The main plot line was pretty strong for a book with this format and I think the reason I gave it such a high rating was because it worked so well. The rating probably wouldn't have been so high had I not read "Haunted" before this. Since I have been accustomed to this style it didn't set me back like it has for some other reviewers. I highly recommend this to any Coupland fan or anyone who loves to read. The book focuses greatly on reading, creativity and the connection it has to our brain (although not in a very realistic, scientific way). If you live to read then I think you would enjoy this. Show Less
LibraryThing member thioviolight
The book started out interesting enough for me and I was able to get through the earlier parts quickly. However, later on, the story started to drag a bit for me. I did manage to finish it, and the story was relevant to the times and not really so bad, but it wasn't as great as I expected. It's
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only the second book of Coupland's I've read, the first being Life After God, which I much enjoyed and made me expect more from Generation A. However, I've browsed through other reviews of this book, so I'm not really discouraged about trying his other works. Show Less
LibraryThing member Paul_S
About as profound as a fortune cookie but immensely entertaining. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the format of characters telling stories. Reminds me of Chucks Palahniuk's haunted. Here the stories also tie into the bigger stories and are echoes of the main story showing how storytellers draw from
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their own life stories to create them. Show Less
LibraryThing member seldombites
This was a highly entertaining read and I highly recommend it.
LibraryThing member Tomleesteenboek
I'm a fan of Coupland's work most of the time, but the problem is that he tends to get sloppy. It's the problem with a lot of his books, and Generation A has the same problem. He takes a well-thought of concept (the bees that become extinct, 5 people that get stung), but then turns into a smudged
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plot. It's not deep, it didn't make me think, it didn't make me laugh. Still, I finished the book, hoping Coupland would still tie it alltogether in the end. Sadly, he did not. I sometimes get the feeling with Coupland that he tries to hard to be original, funny or thought-provocative. People who try to hard, eventually end up writing books that aren't sincere enough. Still, J-Pod e.g. was amazing. Show Less
Awards
Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Shortlist — 2009)
Green Carnation Prize (Longlist — 2010)
Language
Original publication date
2009
Physical description
297 p.; 7.9 inches
ISBN
1439157022 / 9781439157022