Recommended read: "Hey Nostradamus!"
by Douglas Coupland

If you have read the article on this site about Columbine High School and realised that the dark side of the human psyche holds a certain fascination for you, then you will definitely want to read “Hey Nostradamus!” Although work on the book started before the massacre, certain details of the story were later influenced by the shocking events at Columbine.

It is a book for those who are less interested in seeing the action and more interested in getting under the skin of those involved. It tells the story of a high school shooting, but concentrates on the impact that this has on the lives of four characters: Cheryl, 17, already secretely married to her childhood sweetheart and pregnant when she is shot in the school canteen; Jason, 17, Cheryl’s secret lover, the father of the child that will never be born and the boy whose world is irreparably shattered by the shooting; Reg, Jason’s overbearing father whose religious convictions are tested when his son kills one of the highschool gunboys; and Heather, the woman who might have been able to help Jason pick up the pieces of his life.

Coupland is particularly well-known for his first novel Generation X (1991) a brilliant book that pokes fun at life in the age of McDonald’s, showing that when there is nothing left to believe in humour can keep us sane. “Hey Nostradamus!”, published in 2003, is a much more sober book – it has none of the irony or wittiness of “Generation X” – but it has much more psychological depth and it turns out to be a much more moving story.

An extra plus for us is that the language is relatively straightforward. The stories are told from the perspectives of the protagonists, and that helps to keep the narrative conversational.

Here’s an extract from Cheryl’s story (her surname is Anway). She is recalling the summer holiday during which Jason fell in love with her. Frustratingly for Jason, they were both members of a group for devout Christians called “Youth Alive”. (By the way, "fornicate" is an unsexy word for the activity of reproducing the species.)

By the end of that August Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his summer job up the coast working for a mining company. A sample conversation from the period might go:
"Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good."
“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you’d been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?"
Well of course he couldn’t. There was only one way he could get what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, “God doesn’t issue moral credit cards, Jason. He’s not like a bank. You can’t borrow now and pay later."
"My strength - Cheryl, I'm losing it."
"Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren't strong enough to overcome."
I did want Jason but, as I’ve said, only on my terms. I’m not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We’re the sum of our decisions.

* * *

During none of my lunch-hour sessions with the girls at school, or on the Youth Alive trips, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.

Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like rabbits. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It really is a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like locker aroma, I didn’t surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate.

Famous quote from Douglas Coupland:

Interviewer: What do you always carry with you?

Coupland: Earplugs.

Another book in the same genre:

American Pastoral by Philop Roth

Roth’s furious portrayal of al All-American family whose righteousness is shattered by terrorism.