The action starts when Iowa farmboy Zack, midway through combine-harvesting a vast cock and balls corn circle into one of his cornfields, is stung by a bee. When one character spots a group of meth-heads, they observe, "In the old days they'd have been heroin addicts, but poppies require bees." Coupland is very good on the minor ramifications of this. In between now and then, one major thing has happened - bees have become extinct. It's clear from the novel's opening pages that this time is a few short years into the future. But it's going to try to leap out of that endgame and redeem the time.
It's going to stick pretty much to the Coupland template: a small group of plugged-in characters drawn together by a sense of bewilderment at how badly the world is treating them. "I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago." This, in other words, is going to be a novel about the journey from knowledge-of-good-and-evil cynicism to prelapsarian hope. The media call you Generation X, Vonnegut says. The second epigraph comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Syracuse university commencement address of 1994, and is in quite a different register. Develop this as a story you can sell." This is on a par with the writing-while-checking-hairline-in-the-mirror tone of JPod, which was the last time I vacationed in Coupland. Suddenly you've become a novel idea and you've got people wanting to join in.
"Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. The first, from Malcolm McClaren in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, seems to be archly self-referential. For Generation A, he's picked two zingers. They cutely encapsulate what's to follow. Ever since his first book, Generation X, Douglas Coupland has done the best epigraphs.
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