Word: karens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Reported by Jay Branegan, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington
Richard goes on to describe how his girl-friend Karen lapsed into a coma in the middle of senior year, after experiencing eerie premonitions of the future and then ODing on alcohol and diet pills, only one day after the pair "deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope." Nine months later, their child Megan is born, but Karen remains comatose for the next seventeen years...
...awakening throws jolts her friends out of the isolated, automated, unfulfilling lives they have defaulted into. Then, one December evening just before the turn of the century, Karen's dark premonitions of millennial apocalypse vividly come true in Coupland's hypercolor prose. The six friends become the only survivors in a landscape where "endless cars and trucks and minivans sit on road shoulders harboring cargoes of rotted skeletons." In the future, all humanity has collapsed in sleepy death, money has become worthless, and the endless days are tracked only by the clock on Wendy's PowerBook. "Tennis rackets silently unstring...
...Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert." Yet often his quirky comparisons go one step too far and cross over the line between the clever and the ridiculous. After Karen falls into a coma, Richard reminisces about how the remains of high school "flowed by like a wide, slow, pulsing river of cool chocolate milk." All this absurdity is tolerable, even amusing, so long as it doesn't also strive to be deep...
Initially, his characters' worries carry a touching level of insight into the sources of modern emotional malaise. Karen, awaking from eighteen years of slumber, describes how suddenly "nobody seems to be able to endure being by themselves...but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other." Yet as the story plows on, the barrage of philosophical ramblings begin to take on a preachy tone which descends into irritating evangelism. In the end, ghost-jock...