Life After God

This splendidly written book captivates the reader with compassion for the main character as he stumbles through the mistakes and beauty he has created in his life. The book follows the journey of a person who is trying to discover who he is in the midst of a fallen world, void spirituality and broken dreams. I'm a huge fan of the author, Douglas Coupland, and I feel that this is by far his best work. It will make you laugh, cry and ponder this crazy thing we call existence.

About 8 years ago I spent the night at a friend's house one night and had severe insomnia, so I picked up this book from her bookshelf and started reading it. I had never even heard of Douglas Coupland before. The book was so good that I read it the whole way through that night. It's very intense and hit me at a difficult time in my life. It was like reading the Bible- manna to my soul. I have gone on to read every Coupland book I could find, and they are all touching and engaging. I even met him at a book signing here in DC. He's not how I imagined him- he's very unassuming. Anyway, this book is great, just like all of his.

I was only recent introduced to Douglas Coupland by a pal of mine who pestered me for months to try his books. Now I'm glad she did. "Life After God" has a somewhat experimental feel to the narrative, but it's a successful experiment if it is. Coupland explores the concept: "You are the first generation raised without religion." Or more specifically, how human beings (all of which are born with a drive to believe in something -- religion, politics, art) respond to the material-driven world. Meditations on what separates humans from animals, imagining a nuclear explosion and how it would immediately impact the people who die in it, a philosophical bout with depression, and how people respond to their "lives after God." Disregard the initially off-putting title of the book, because that title really doesn't reflect what the book is about. At the end of one short story, the narrator concludes, "My secret is that I need God." Not the way religious fanatic Dana does, which is more needy and superficial, but rather in a deep and primal way. And Coupland doesn't go overboard trying to explain it to the readers -- he just writes it and lets it sink in.It has a slightly odd format; the pages are tiny, and the parts of each short story are more like connected vignettes, some only a few sentences long. And it's sprinkled with cute little drawings, like Coupland doodled on his manuscript. (Rain, boxes, computers, matches, and a parakeet with a key in its beak, among others) As in Coupland's other books, there is a sort of unhappy optimism to these stories, and Coupland's musings about how a lack of emphasized God has affected our ability to love and believe."Life After God" is not exactly an ordinary book. But it touches very well on hard-to-write-about topics and its messages lingered for a long time in my mind.

This book, like most by Douglas Coupland, is a fast-paced, easy read. The book that I read was very compact (more wallet-sized than like a book) and hard-back, so its small pages passed by in a flash of wonder and amazement.In a collection of six poignant short stories filled with colorful and full characters, Coupland addresses issues that affects us all: bravely looking at death, change, the passage of life; wondering who you are or waking up to suddenly realize that you don't know where you're going, or that you don't like who you are.Despite the atheistic title, the characters all are in search of God, and toward the end one of his characters admits that he "needs" God, but can't seem to allow that secret to come out. But how can we find any reality in the world of fast-moving cars, of freedom of movement and blindingly fast change, of religious fanatics, televangelists, a world tempered by drugs and a search for meaning, any meaning?Coupland's answer comes out in the beauty of nature and the wonder of our relationships with the people around us. Although his characters can't relate to the Jesus-lovers of organized religion, they are all reaching out for something bigger than themselves, something that "the first Generation raised without Religion" has a difficulty grasping.I have long felt that Douglas Coupland and his insights are perhaps the closest that popular culture gets to Truth spelled out on paper. This book has all the profundity and all the questions of his preceding books, in a very unassuming and readable manner. Pick it up: you'll read it in a single afternoon.

Forget the more famous "Generation X." The collection "Life After God" is Coupland's best work by far. This collection of stories is related by theme and narrative voice; while the characters change from story to story, the point of view remains the same, and Coupland uses the same narrative voice throughout. And what a voice it is! Funny, Perceptive, Sad, resigned to the past yet yearning for a better future--a future which the author fears might always elude him. The characters in "Life After God" are more like real people than the characters in his other books, who often assume the roles of cultural stereotypes and morph into cliches. In different ways, the characters in "Life After God" are all dealing with loss--the loss of a lover, of a sister, a childhood friend, one's own idealism. And there are no happy endings. At best the characters manage to accept their losses and find a sliver of hope to carry them through the rest of their lives. Coupland's prose is lean and poetic; his eye for detail manages to convey much about a character or a situation through the use of one or two objects. His monotone prose reflects the flat, wounded states of his characters' souls. Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way. Despite his reputation as a novelist, short fiction seems to be Coupland's natural medium. His storytelling talents are average at best, but his observations of character and feeling are superb. It is the latter which makes "Life After God" such a moving experience.