Shelf Space - A shot in the dark

Not one to shy away from pop culture, Douglas Coupland has made a career out of exploiting everything from the slacker culture (Generation X, Shampoo Planet) to the cult of Microsoft (Microserfs). It should come as no shock then that he uses a Columbine-like shoot out as backdrop for his latest novel.

Hey Nostradamus! (Bloomsbury) opens with the familiar Colorado high school-style shooting, as three camouflaged misfits open fire in the school lunch room. It’s in the cafeteria that teenager Cheryl, one of the book’s narrators, is killed and instantly martyred. Through Cheryl’s conversations with God we start to learn her secrets, like her marriage to fellow teen Christian group member Jason (Cheryl and Jason have found the loophole to teen sex: With marriage, it’s no longer a sin!).

Like Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, Coupland has a knack for unraveling the absurdity with dark humor and high drama. Here he skips the drama and absurdity and simply settles for being dark.

The “ripped from the headlines” premise itself is far from original; the most shocking fact is that some novelist didn’t take the plot device first. Coupland, credited for bringing the term “Generation X” into the mainstream, has filled a bookshelf by using popular culture touchstones as props and plot devices in almost everything he writes.

Why then does Hey Nostradamus! fall so flat? Nothing really happens. The book explodes early on with the blood-drenched campus assassinations, but the action pretty much ends there. We know within the first few pages (and from the jacket copy) that Cheryl dies. What few surprises unfold later aren’t compelling enough to keep one’s attention. There are the occasional odd detours into thoughts about cloning, the souls of twins and face mapping, but the side roads are pretty uneventful.

In All Families are Psychotic, readers were given a slew of deplorable characters but still managed to find a couple to root for. In his latest, the characters are simply too dull to care about. Not even Nostradamus could have predicted such an uneventful book from someone as talented as Coupland.

Shelf Space is a weekly column on books and Atlanta’s literary scene.