Was This Book Necessary?
by St. Clair Carr, literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
Last week, in our concise information-packed review, using NEW IMPROVED HEAD's patented advanced book review compression technology, of eleven – yes, eleven – possible choices for your summer reading, I mentioned that I had been so impressed by the performance of Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! when subjected to the exacting standards of our Fictionator 2.0 software that I had bought it for some summer reading of my own.
And I read it. And I enjoyed it, as Fictionator predicted. The only problem is that perhaps I shouldn't have.
On the face of it, Hey Nostradamus! is a load of the old codswallop, and not a very artfully constructed load of it at that. It is an epistolary novel consisting of four long narratives written by four different narrators. Well, they claim they're different, although they all write in exactly the same style, and one of them is supposed to be dead, which makes you wonder how Mr. Coupland is supposed to have got his hands on her contribution.
Perhaps this is intended to get us to reflect on the convention of suspension of disbelief and realize that what we are reading is not a first-person narrative but a story, and a story written by one person, not four, and that it is that person's ideas and intentions which are crucial rather than the characters'. Or something like that. But it's been done already, and done well, notably by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière way back in 1967, in Belle de Jour, a movie which has the additional benefit for many of us of featuring Catherine Deneuve in her undies, a benefit to which Hey Nostradamus! offers nothing comparable.
Well, what do these ostensible characters have to say? Other reviews of this book have mentioned that in it Mr. Coupland takes on the Big Ideas: religion, faith, life, death, and other things that have kept the Human Race from really living up to its potential. And he deals with knowledge, specifically the type of knowledge that enables us to predict, as you might expect from the title.
Mr. Coupland wrestles with these ideas, but the match is still undecided at the end of the book. The Big Ideas don't get the best of Mr. Coupland, but he doesn't get the best of them, either. He raises interesting points and provokes interesting thoughts, but rather than develop them he turns instead to some new outlandish incident in the series of such incidents that propels his plot.
After finishing Hey Nostradamus I was reminded of The Auction Sale by C. H. B. Kitchin, which I consider one of the best novels I have read in my life. After I finished The Auction Sale my mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of it, just as it worked furiously after reading Hey Nostradamus! The difference is that I found some sense in The Auction Sale.
Oh, Hey Nostradamus! is just so…contemporary. We wouldn't want to be… judgmental. Judgmentalism is the most despised sin of our age, which is surprising considering its novelty. I never heard the word until about 1990, and now I expect the Vatican to announce any day that lasciviousness is out of the seven deadly sins and judgmentalism is in with a bullet.
So to avoid being judgmental we avoid reaching a freaking conclusion (the bad guy among the four narrators is the most judgmental of the lot, so I don't think I'm sniffing up a false trail here). If you prefer the bewilderment and awe (or is it the neurotic denial?) of the non-judgmental to the utility of the analytical, this is your book.
But, even though I consider being non-judgmental a mug's game, I liked the book. Now why was that? I think it's because Mr. Coupland has matured into a good stylist. Maybe not good enough to provide different writing styles for different characters, but still a purveyor of unaffected prose and striking, appropriate imagery. And he raises, as I mentioned, interesting points and provokes interesting thoughts. I kept turning the pages, and if he'd written a thousand more I'd probably still be turning them. Not getting anywhere, just turning.
Was This Book Necessary? © John FitzGerald, 2002
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