Life After God
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4.5 • 42 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
We are the first generation raised without God. We are creatures with strong religious impulses, yet they have nowhere to flow in this world of malls and TV, Kraft dinners and jets. How do we cope with loneliness? Anxiety? The collapse of relationships?
How do we reach the quiet, safe layer of our lives? In this compellingly innovative collection of stories, bestselling author Douglas Coupland responds to these themes. Cutting through the hype of modern living to find a rare grace amid our lives, he uncovers a new kind of truth for a culture stuck on fast-forward. A culture seemingly beyond God.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coupland's Generation X and Shampoo Planet explored the ennui of a generation of young adults, reared on a promiscuous diet of mass culture, who regard politics, sex, the job market, global events and religion with the same degree of ironic apathy. His new collection of stories offers variations on that same theme, a series of loosely connected, escapist adventures in which a 30-year-old narrator flees a middling job and hits the road in quest of authentic spiritual experience, reflecting with mixed nostalgia and despair upon past events, from his insular suburban upbringing to his recently dissolved marriage. In the opening story, ``Little Creatures,'' the narrator, harassed by legal troubles and recriminating phone calls from his ex-wife, accompanies his young daughter on a car trip north from Vancouver into a primeval landscape enveloped in snow. After his car conks out in a desolate stretch of Nevada, the protagonist of ``In the Desert'' meets a wizened vagrant who feeds him cold fast-food before vanishing without a trace, leaving the narrator to muse about the transcendent value of ``small acts of mercy.'' Like Generation X , the margins of which held snippets of data and other visual aids, Life After God is illustrated with childlike drawings of cute animals, appliances, barren landscapes, road signs and other symbols, a faux naif touch that underscores Coupland's fetish for lost innocence. Although these tales of escape from the taint of middle-class culture and technology occasionally do strike a note of real feeling, they succeed less as an allegory for a postmodern, post-ironic spiritual life than as an amusing travelogue for jaded, pop-culturally literate couch potatoes.
Customer Reviews
Swift, authentic and essential
The first time I read this book I was in college, and though I'm not prone to dramatic brooding or wild mood swings twenty years later, I do occasionally *need* this book.
It is not subtle. It is not entirely transparent, but it's the closest I can get to pretending I'm not especially alone or unloveable because it feels like a person I keep on reserve. I've given away so many copies by now I couldn't possibly keep track and this would be how I'd try to convince someone to read it:
Short, simple language, childlike drawings - constant reminders that no on is innocent, but there is no need for redemption. Stupid, embarrassing, unkind decisions are made all the time, but guilt is not productive. New lows are eventually laughable compared to previously lowest lows. Love might feel strong enough to be real and time and god might be all around us, everything mixed and invisible. Or - maybe we don't believe there is a god, but secretly wish there was. I don't believe and I want to want to, and that's as far as I've gotten.
How much genuine pain is too much, and where does our loneliness end, meeting with self pity? All people hide this one critical truth from ourselves and others, but we all know: self serving or false intentions are a fact, not a question ( I'd refer you to Robertson Davies 'The Manticore' for the best quote on this topic I've read in fiction).
We do things we'd be ashamed of if we knew how, but shame is public and we can avoid people forever now. We feel regret and remorse and sadness and it doesn't matter what is real and what is a fairytale because it just doesn't. It really doesn't. It's a story. I try to appreciate that, but it's not a comfort.
This book doesn't feel entirely NOT autobiographical, but I try not to read about books that matter much to me, so I can't say how Coupland answers that question. I think what I want to think. Maybe it's more real than fiction or completely disassociated from anyone or any experience. I am unable to understand why that matters.
It can't matter.
If this book were a person, I'd want to know it. And I would worry about it. It lets me feel what people don't p want to let me — not special, but at least human. When I need to feel something I can't, but I know anything is enough, I read it again.