The Novel Can Save Our Web-Addled Brains

You know the feeling. You sit at your computer, a dozen windows open on your screen, skipping and clicking among them. You read a paragraph of an article, check movie times, and skim a few news headlines, all while chatting with a friend about your take on last night’s Mad Men. An e-mail pops up and you click over only to find it’s another Amazon promotion. You think for a second that you should unsubscribe, but didn’t you already try that and maybe you can’t unsubscribe from Amazon, and didn’t you mean to buy that book your friend just mentioned?! Suddenly you hit an overload moment and screech to a stop. Wait a minute, you wonder. Is the Internet destroying my brain? It’s not that the information you’re taking in is necessarily trivial—you might be reading about, say, climate change in one of those windows—it’s the way you’re receiving it, in fragmented bits, that frays your consciousness.

More and more, we’re allowing fragments of information to fill our brains, instead of the extended narratives that have long sustained our imaginations and our intellects. Of course, the history of culture is rife with such warnings and often they utterly missed the point of whichever creative development (the novel! photography! movies!) they reviled. And it’s possible to go overboard. Douglas Coupland, in his latest novel, blames the disappearance of storytelling for global warming. But even here, he is getting at something. One climate change group [2] persuasively advocates using stories as a way of breaking through willful ignorance of the realities of climate change. The idea is that stories can do for us what they’ve always done—allow us to understand something that we can’t yet see, to experience something that might be geographically distant. And if the stories break through our fog of information and self-absorption to shock us into awareness of what’s happening to the planet, then maybe we can do something about it. Maybe stories, with their narrative progressions, their beginnings, middles, and ends, their heroes, can save us from ourselves.

Douglas Coupland, for one, would like to think so. When we meet the five protagonists of his new novel, Generation A [3], they’re 15 years in the future and deep in the virtual headspace of global consumer culture, with little interest in emerging. “I did not wish to be a passive participant in the Internet,” says Harj, an Abercrombie & Fitch call-center employee in Sri Lanka, “I wanted to add my voice to the babble.” Our other characters are Julien, a World of Warcraft devotee who has just been ejected from 114 days in-game; Zack, a Type-A farmer of genetically modified corn, whose harvester is outfitted with several plasma-screened satellite feeds; Diana, a “foul-mouthed ex-church-lady” from Canada; and Samantha, who fills her time with geo-caching-type activities in New Zealand.

Coupland is, of course, riffing on his first novel, Generation X [4], the 1991 bestseller that named the post-Baby Boom generation and gave a sharply cynical description of its corporate-induced malaise. If Generation X showed us a landscape of shopping malls, housing developments, and landfills overflowing with plastic, Generation A has gone global and much higher-tech. Coupland can caricature the zeitgeist like no one else, and here he homes in on the way our society is defined by its technology. He refers, in a breezy aside, to a moment in time that was “right at the tipping point when handheld devices enslaved the human psyche” or explains that “Amazon increases the need of humans to own books, but not necessarily to read them.” These observations are especially zingy when they come from Zack or Harj, the book’s most compelling characters, who offer frequent, comical indictments of globalization and its pawns.

Coupland has been called a “futurist” and a “techno-soothsayer,” as much for the way he tosses these observations together with appealingly Po-Mo narrative techniques as for the observations themselves. The multiple narrators, the occasional strings of code or chat-speak, the yelps and squawks of advertising language that pepper the text, all make Coupland’s writing slickly readable and entertaining. But it doesn’t take much digging for Coupland’s futuristic framework to give way to something more traditional.

The world these five live in has moved to the next level of planetary decay with the extinction of bees. There are no flowers, almonds are a distant memory, and an apple strudel is the height of culinary luxury. So when all five are stung by bees, the event airlifts them out of the miasma of virtual culture and to the forefront of environmental and human history. Big questions follow: Are the bees coming back? Why were these five chosen? And, hey, what ever happened to Post Modernism anyway? Because being stung by a bee isn’t much different from pulling a sword from a stone, and what we’ve got here are some old-fashioned heroes.

The need for heroes and the narratives they inhabit, is, it turns out, Coupland’s point. Bellwethers of the next phase of environmental and human history, the five are ushered up to a remote island off the northwest coast of Canada. There, an evil scientist charges them with a mission. They have to tell one another stories. “I do not want anecdotes from your life,” says the scientist. “I want stories. Stories you invent. Stories that have no other goal in life than to be stories.”

In a scene pointedly taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron [5], in which travelers tell stories as they hide out from the bubonic plague, these five characters find that the narrative act simultaneously creates a new intimacy among the group and gives each a stronger sense of his or her individual self. “Finally,” says Julien, “my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.” If stories kept the culture alive in Renaissance Italy, Coupland suggests, then they can do the same for us now. As the five characters tell their tales, the importance of language, of reading, and of imagining oneself as a hero in an overarching narrative, comes to the fore. It’s through storytelling that these five heroes finally discover the truth about what’s happening to them, and, by extension, to the planet.

In interviews, Coupland will insist that he’s not a Luddite, that he embraces new technology, that he is, indeed, a “futurist,” but it’s hard not to read an earnest message in all of this. Coupland is warning us to do something about the loss of coherent narratives in our lives. His next book is a biography of Marshall McLuhan, due out in 2010, and Coupland puts the media critic’s ideas to energetic use in Generation A. If the medium is the message, and the message changes its audience, then the fragmentary nature of the Internet, PDAs, and spliced-together bits of so-called reality are wreaking havoc on us. If we lose the ability to project ourselves into stories in which there is a hero, in which that hero fights and overcomes obstacles and finally leads humanity toward a greater future—that simple old saw of the novel—then we lose our ability to distinguish the arc of history from the detritus of culture; we let the bees die; we lose our humanity and consequently the planet.

Generation A doesn’t quite have the emotional depth to draw its reader deep into its heroes’ journeys. What Coupland is good at, after all, are broad, generational portraits. If the novel lacks for fullness of character and plot, though, it makes up for it with the persuasive sharpness of its ideas. Coupland is right—some of us might absorb the message of climate change through facts and informative fragments, but many will need the sentiment, the emotional highs and lows, the setting of a scene to really take it in. The scientists and politicians who warn us about the environmental catastrophe might take a page from Coupland's book. Tell us stories, describe the hazy, buzzy childhood summer that we’ll never see again, show us how barren our own life stories will be once the bees are gone.

Several weeks ago, Al Gore was on The Daily Show talking to Jon Stewart about his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis [6]. “I took this class over the weekend,” said Stewart, waving the book at Gore. “I read your book, but when I got to the end, I still didn’t know what to do.” In spite of his title, Gore seemed stuck for instructions. Generation A has an answer that might surprise Stewart: Read a novel. Because, guess what, says Coupland, the Internet is destroying your brain, and if you don’t step away from the screen, it just might take the planet out, too.