Hey Nostradamus!
by
by
Douglas Coupland (Goodreads Author)
Original Sin in British Columbia
Original Sin is real. It’s called language, especially language badly used. Sometimes this sin is redeemed by the beautiful, or startling, or at least interesting, use of language in fiction. Hey Nostradamus is an instance of entirely unredeemed original sin, an example of writing because one can write with nothing much to write about. Perhaps that’s the author’s point, the vacuity of life in Vancouver.
What starts as a YA account of her death by a naive teenage religious fundamentalist turns into a bizarre story of Canadian Noir. The bleak side of Vancouver’s smug suburban calm is the central topic. Although a Canadian city, Vancouver is culturally part of the American Pacific Rim, more like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles than Calgary, Toronto and Quebec. Not a twin but an analog, something with the same general features but a particular identity. Or as religious people say: a soul.
Vancouver has the same chain restaurants as the cities further South, the same automobiles, the same adverts, and the same crumby motels. It faces the Orient with its back to the mountains and the biggest highways run South not East. The Union Jack and the Confederate Stars and Bars are analogous, both designating distinctions with subliminal power. Its snobbery is all West Coast. Even though it thinks itself special, it’s really only Orange County in the rain.
Nevertheless, according to Coupland, Vancouverites are particularly strange folk. High school kids elope to Las Vegas; a man agrees to impregnate his sister-in-law hours after his brothers death (but only in Las Vegas!); the sister-in-law casually commits murder to conceal the conspiracy (once again Las Vegas, the safety valve for all West Coast cities); the man himself disappears, so his girlfriend (not his sister-in-law, pay attention) goes in search of... well not him but his analog who is understandably upset at being ‘found’ (not in Las Vegas surprisingly but in Portland, an analogous city).
What appears to be a constant among these characters is an obsession with self-expression. They all feel compelled to write - about a high school massacre, religious hypocrisy, vague international drug deals, counterfeiting, gangland revenge, the search for the mythical Sasquatch, a phoney psychic who knows about running a good scam, and the psychic’s mark who, incredibly, participates in it.
These epistolary adventures have no real narrative connection with each other. Each occurs and is then left hanging as a fact the reader is meant to absorb and forget. Each narrator refers to him or herself largely in the third person. Obviously they are all the author in not very convincing incognito. Equally obviously, the adventures are not his own. What then is the subject of this fiction? Ah yes, the city, the city whose uniqueness apparently lies in its particularly weird residents, none of whom are particularly believable... or interesting. Too bad about Vancouver’s lack of soul.
Original Sin is real. It’s called language, especially language badly used. Sometimes this sin is redeemed by the beautiful, or startling, or at least interesting, use of language in fiction. Hey Nostradamus is an instance of entirely unredeemed original sin, an example of writing because one can write with nothing much to write about. Perhaps that’s the author’s point, the vacuity of life in Vancouver.
What starts as a YA account of her death by a naive teenage religious fundamentalist turns into a bizarre story of Canadian Noir. The bleak side of Vancouver’s smug suburban calm is the central topic. Although a Canadian city, Vancouver is culturally part of the American Pacific Rim, more like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles than Calgary, Toronto and Quebec. Not a twin but an analog, something with the same general features but a particular identity. Or as religious people say: a soul.
Vancouver has the same chain restaurants as the cities further South, the same automobiles, the same adverts, and the same crumby motels. It faces the Orient with its back to the mountains and the biggest highways run South not East. The Union Jack and the Confederate Stars and Bars are analogous, both designating distinctions with subliminal power. Its snobbery is all West Coast. Even though it thinks itself special, it’s really only Orange County in the rain.
Nevertheless, according to Coupland, Vancouverites are particularly strange folk. High school kids elope to Las Vegas; a man agrees to impregnate his sister-in-law hours after his brothers death (but only in Las Vegas!); the sister-in-law casually commits murder to conceal the conspiracy (once again Las Vegas, the safety valve for all West Coast cities); the man himself disappears, so his girlfriend (not his sister-in-law, pay attention) goes in search of... well not him but his analog who is understandably upset at being ‘found’ (not in Las Vegas surprisingly but in Portland, an analogous city).
What appears to be a constant among these characters is an obsession with self-expression. They all feel compelled to write - about a high school massacre, religious hypocrisy, vague international drug deals, counterfeiting, gangland revenge, the search for the mythical Sasquatch, a phoney psychic who knows about running a good scam, and the psychic’s mark who, incredibly, participates in it.
These epistolary adventures have no real narrative connection with each other. Each occurs and is then left hanging as a fact the reader is meant to absorb and forget. Each narrator refers to him or herself largely in the third person. Obviously they are all the author in not very convincing incognito. Equally obviously, the adventures are not his own. What then is the subject of this fiction? Ah yes, the city, the city whose uniqueness apparently lies in its particularly weird residents, none of whom are particularly believable... or interesting. Too bad about Vancouver’s lack of soul.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 12, 2020
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