What's in this book
- Douglas Coupland's 2003 novel - a high-school massacre and the next twenty years of its survivors and witnesses
- Canonical contemporary North American literary novel about Columbine-era American violence
- 244 pages of four-narrator construction across the survivors, the bystanders, and a parent twenty years later
- Set in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1988 and the subsequent decades
- For readers of Generation X, Microserfs, the broader Coupland catalog, and contemporary literary fiction
- A canonical entry in the contemporary North American post-violence literary tradition
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Hey Nostradamus! is the 2003 Douglas Coupland novel about a Vancouver-area high school cafeteria shooting and the four people whose lives are most damaged by it. The book is narrated in four sections, by four different people across multiple decades: Cheryl, a victim killed in the shooting; Jason, her secret husband who survived; Heather, the woman who falls in love with Jason years later; Reg, Jason's difficult Christian father, who has been processing his own grief about the failure of his relationship with his son.
Coupland's strength in Hey Nostradamus! is the four-voice structural commitment. Each narrator gets full interior space and Coupland honors the differences. The Vancouver geography is rendered with care. The exploration of the way fundamentalist Christianity ages across the decades after a trauma is some of the most patient writing Coupland has ever done. Fans of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex or Donna Tartt's The Secret History will recognize the careful multi-decade literary structure.
The book is shorter than its ambition would suggest. The closing chapters land with appropriate weight.
Five stars. One of Coupland's genuine peaks. The Hey Nostradamus! Douglas Coupland novel is essential reading for anyone interested in serious contemporary North American fiction. Recommended without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked Hey Nostradamus!
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
by Douglas Coupland
Generation X by Douglas Coupland review. The 1991 novel that named a generation. A trio of young Californians, the desert, and one of the genuinely defining literary debuts of the 90s.
Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland review. The 1995 novel about Microsoft programmers starting a Bay Area startup. The defining Silicon Valley novel of its decade.
All Families Are Psychotic
by Douglas Coupland
All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland review. A 2001 novel about a Florida family reunion before a NASA launch. Coupland's comic precision at career-mid peak.
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