Title: Hey Nostradamus! Author: Douglas Coupland Publisher: Flamingo Douglas Coupland's work has always explored the themes of finding and making meaning, like a post-Nixon Satrean orphan dragging up characters to ask his readers, "What the fuck are you doing with your life?" Whether it's the search, as in Life After God, the call to search in Girlfriend in a Coma, or the substitute of traditional meanings in Polaroids of the Dead and Microserfs, Coupland has given us seriously profound questions beneath the blanket of pop-cultural references most critics seem to get lost in. With Hey Nostradamus! He's stripped back most of the artifice and gone straight for the spiritual jugular. Set in the aftermath of a high-school shooting, loosely based on the Columbine massacre, the narrative is split into four paths, all victims, if you like, whose lives and deaths are now irrevocably confined as a result. The first, and most downright irritating voice Coupland has ever (unintentionally?) created, is that of Cheryl, a middle American evangelist Christian, who gets shot in the cafeteria, and whose "God is here God is nowhere God is here" scribbling gets taken up as the last testament of a martyr by the youth group who survive her. The only point at which I could penetrate Cheryl's humanity, as opposed to her religious pseudo mumblings and banal high school jitterings (Coupland nailed the voice, that's for sure) is when she's crouched under a table, three shooters going wild. "It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg." The rest of the novel is equally intense, the narrative shifting from Cheryl's boyfriend Jason to his dead brother's wife, to the ever-righteous father Reg. Each one of these is equally destabilised by that day, each staggers in many ways to find reason where there is none, solace that doesn't destroy them, and clear answers to questions that should never have had to be asked. In considering the aftermath of a massacre, whether it's September 11th or Columbine or Oklahoma or Madrid, Coupland appears to be asking us what has it come to when "everybody's just one spit ball away from being a mall bomber." For those who remember Coupland only by the slacker culture that Generation X was held responsible for, they'll be very surprised by this mature and mostly sober novel. Like Chuck Palahnuik, Coupland is casting a fluorescent light onto contemporary life in a way few others can manage. This is a book that beats on the table like one of its characters, pleading, " We mean something. We must... I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left?"