Novel: Girlfriend in a Coma

Overview

Doug Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma blends coming-of-age realism with speculative apocalypse to track a circle of Vancouver teenagers from 1979 into the late 1990s. A ghostly narrator, their dead classmate Jared, frames the tale as both memory and warning. At its center is Karen McNeil, who foretells a bleak future and then falls into a mysterious coma the night of a high school party. Her condition, and the world that forms around it, becomes a metaphor for spiritual paralysis in late-20th-century life, an era of abundance shading into vacancy.

The Coma and its Fallout

Before slipping under, Karen confides to her boyfriend Richard that she has seen visions of a hollowed-out future where the texture of life feels drained of meaning. She then collapses and does not wake for seventeen years. While comatose, she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, who is raised within the friendship circle, with Richard and their friend Wendy becoming her anchors. The group drifts into the 1980s and 1990s, each taking on adult roles that never quite cohere into purpose. Careers happen, appetites are maintained, and nostalgia becomes a reflex, yet all of them circle the absence Karen has left behind, both literal and existential.

Awakening and Dislocation

Karen wakes in 1997. Her return is a miracle that immediately becomes an ordeal. She has lost nearly two decades, and the future she once dreamed about is now ordinary reality: cable channels and mall culture, cubicles and information glut, a polished surface over spiritual vacancy. Reunited with Megan, now a teenager, and with Richard, she tries to reconcile the past’s intimacies with the present’s estrangement. The friends discover that Karen’s premonitions have not faded; they have deepened. Her message is simple and unnerving: something is wrong with the world’s soul, and a reckoning is coming.

The Global Sleep

That reckoning arrives as a quiet apocalypse. People everywhere grow fatigued, lie down, and never rise. The city falls still. Planes do not crash; alarms do not blare. Civilization simply stops, leaving the small circle of friends and Megan inexplicably spared. They inhabit an emptied Vancouver, scavenging groceries, paging through abandoned magazines, watching the last light bulbs dim. Their survival strips life to essentials, and the long, uncanny days become a mirror: the habits and evasions of their youth have scaled up into a species-wide sleep.

Jared’s Charge

Jared returns in earnest as a guide. He tells them they have been chosen not for virtue but for knowledge, they have seen the end inside their own lives and can therefore choose differently. The world can be restored, he says, only if they reject the numbing irony that governed their adult years and practice courage, candor, and care. The test is not theatrical heroism but acts of moral attention: facing people they wronged, naming love plainly, refusing the shrug of detachment. If they can do this, if they can say something true and generous to the world, history may bend back into motion.

Resolution and Meaning

Coupland lets the finale hover between miracle and parable. The friends attempt Jared’s prescription, confessing, consoling, and choosing responsibility over drift. The narrative intimates that the halted world stirs, as if granted a reset contingent on their change of heart. The novel’s title becomes emblematic: Karen’s coma is everyone’s, a suspension of feeling and duty inside a culture of ease. By marrying intimate melodrama to end-times fable, Girlfriend in a Coma argues that apocalypse is less an explosion than a mood, and that waking up is a moral act, undertaken together.