'Nostradamus' shines a light into the dark corner of a high-school shooting

Canadian Douglas Coupland (author of "Microserfs," "All Families are Psychotic" and other novels and nonfiction books) has made a career out of being in tune with the dark corners of popular culture, whether those corners happen to exist in the jargon-riddled campus bubble of software programmers or in the dislocated anomie of Generation X. For better or for worse, he's at it again with his latest novel, "Hey Nostradamus!," which chronicles the horror of a Columbine-like high-school shooting and its reverberating aftermath.

Coupland sets the novel in Vancouver, B.C., his hometown. Sad to say, this kind of all-too-familiar adolescent act of rage feels like a distinctly American phenomenon, and the Canadian backdrop is the first of many things about the book that don't feel quite right. There's no particular reason for the story to be set in Vancouver, aside from the fact that that's where Coupland lives; the city, as described here, feels thoroughly generic. (Oddly, Coupland also has a nonfiction book, "City of Glass," coming out in the U.S. — it's a cheeky, stylish, idiosyncratic user's guide to Vancouver that goes a lot further toward conveying the essence of the city.)

"Nostradamus" is narrated by four different characters. The first, Cheryl, is a victim of the 1988 shooting. Cheryl is a self-described "cliché girl next door" who happens to be in the high-school cafeteria on the wrong day at the wrong time. She narrates from the beyond. Woven into her opening section are the overheard prayers of those affected by the killings: "Dear Lord, if You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways of doing things."

Subsequent chapters move into the future: Eleven years later, Jason, Cheryl's boyfriend, is still reeling from the attack. His section, the longest, works best, and is the heart of the book. Next, Heather, a friend of Jason's, presents us with a different perspective on life after devastating loss. Reg, Jason's overbearingly devout and dogmatic father, brings the novel to a close.

None of these chapters is wholly satisfying, and taken together they read more like an outline than a finished novel. The reader has to supply many of the connections the author leaves out, and some of the most dramatic twists happen offstage.

The novel sets out to explore the complicated intersection of faith and senseless tragedy — Reg, Cheryl and Jason are all Christians who have to reconcile their beliefs with the pointlessness of the killings. But Coupland can't get far beyond the superficial. Much is made of Cheryl's absent-minded scribblings in a notebook before the massacre. "God is nowhere/God is now here," she writes. The author doesn't offer anything much deeper.

For a novel set in what Coupland calls a city of glass, "Hey Nostradamus!" is frustratingly opaque. There is no why — no motivation for the killings, no motivation for some characters' embrace of religion, no motivation for anything, really. This may be true to life, but it doesn't make compelling fiction. Coupland also includes a slew of pointless and implausible plot twists (twins conceived improbably on the night of their father's death; a grief-stricken widow who commits an almost offhand murder; a "psychic" who delivers real messages from beyond the grave) that end up distancing the reader from the story.

The fact is, though, that events like these, rooted as they are so close to reality, have a certain raw emotional power of their own. And while the novel is fundamentally unsatisfying, it is, like much of Coupland's work, no chore to read. There are even a few sharp, surprisingly powerful moments, and in the end, some of the voices linger.

Jason, Coupland's broken, conflicted hero, has an affecting presence. Where the book succeeds best is in creating a sense of him, quiet and ordinary and completely devastated, moving woodenly through a world from which he's utterly disconnected.

Mary Brennan: mbrennan@yahoo.com