Review
HEY NOSTRADAMUS!
By Douglas Coupland
Random House Canada, 244 pp.
Has Douglas Coupland, author of Life After God, finally battled his way out of the spiritual morass of postmodernity? Perhaps. His newest novel, Hey Nostradamus!, is a work conspicuously preoccupied with faith.
The book is made up of four narratives, all bound by one event – a school shooting in a Vancouver suburb in 1988. It opens with an account of that day’s events told in the first-person by Cheryl, one of the deceased. She inhabits a kind of limbo and, in an unfortunate twist, is now privy to the angst-ridden prayers generated by the killings. Coupland treats his readers to a liberal sampling: "Dear Lord, If You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways of doing things." It all works, however, and the Columbine-like slaughter she recounts is almost too compelling.
For a reader coming fresh to Coupland, the next three narratives are more characteristic than the first. That is to say, the chains of causality and probability seem to come undone. We jump to the late 1990s for the story of Jason, Cheryl’s boyfriend at the time of her death. He has never really recovered from the shootings, and has spent the intervening years drinking regularly and working sporadically. He recounts his own version of the events of that day and spends a few words describing what little has befallen him since.
The novel seems to be winding down at this point (roughly halfway through), when Jason takes a mystery drug on a whim. The surreal sequence that follows is never fully explained, but it is enough to lurch the dramatic impetus into the present with deus-ex-machina finality. It’s not contrived, though – it’s Coupland.
The last two narratives are those of Jason’s current girlfriend, Heather, and his father, Reg. Although there are stock Coupland devices to come – strange searches, unpredictable plot twists – these narratives are about Reg’s redemption, his transformation from a destructive religious fanatic to someone capable of loving and being loved.
Coupland is justly famous for his social satire. He has the ability to capture the ethos of a time through the most mundane details. Where he suffers, it has been said, is in characterization. Hey Nostradamus! is an improvement in this regard, even in comparison to relatively recent works like Miss Wyoming. From the first line to the Biblically resonant conclusion, Hey Nostradamus! is a more sombre, less satirical work than his prior novels – and perhaps the absence of biting satire makes stronger characterization possible. Spiritually, nothing is fully resolved in this novel, but it does feel as if a resolution is possible.
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