I must have been reading the on-line review of Douglas Coupland's Binge, as when I went to put it on hold at the library the line ahead of me wasn't long at all (as it would be after the print version appeared). Ironically, it took several days for the e-book version to become available, and I am sort of in the middle of the queue for that. Why would I want the e-book version, after I have read the book in hard copy? Well, the book's structure -- 60 very short stories of 4 pages with many shared characters -- makes it hard to keep track of how the characters are linked. It would be much easier to do a search on "Julie" or "Leah" to see how often they cropped up in others' stories than to flip through the book over and over again.
In some ways, this feels like an even more extreme version of Altman's Short Cuts (where he combined characters from Carver stories that didn't actually overlap in the originals). The stories aren't particularly chronological, and it doesn't seem as if this is supposed to cohere into some mega-novel (as Cortazar's Hopscotch does, sort of). It's a bit more like looking a story about a mid-sized city on Wikipedia and then randomly clicking on some of the links to find out more about key characters. Pretty much everybody gets their minute in the sun, but with only 4 pages we get only a glimpse, either into whatever is preoccupying them at the moment or, just as likely, some major (traumatic) incident from their past that brought them to that point in their lives. It will make me sense if/when you read some of the stories on your own.
In some cases, two stories just show the inner thoughts of each character as they go through a meeting, such as "Dasani" and "Effexor." We also have a cynical anti-O. Henry story in the paired stories "Unleaded" and "Lurking Account" where a man starts cheating on his dying wife, while, unbeknownst to him, she is having an affair with one of the hospice workers.
If this were a novel in (many) pieces, then I think we would have found out more why Ned was recruiting Isaac (after a breakdown partially covered in the stories "Lego" and "Sharpies"), but this thread seems to have been dropped, unless I just missed the connection.
I'm not sure there is enough plot in Binge to really be SPOILED, but just in case, SPOILERS AHEAD.
In the 2nd half, Coupland's peeks into others people's lives gets progressively darker, and we meet up with a woman who has her husband knocked off, and then starts feeding fentanyl-laced drugs to her co-conspirator to cover her tracks ("Oxy") and a disturbing number of people that just happen to have bodies stashed away in their cargo carriers. I'm still trying to work out why one man was attacked and stuffed into one of these carriers (still alive as the story ended though presumably not for much longer...). This is where doing an electronic search would come in very handy, as I might be able to cross-reference something in one of the other stories.
Most the characters seem to be on the younger-side of Gen X or Millennials, though Coupland also delves into the lives of their children (Gen Zers), though not always as convincingly. COVID crops up in a few of the stories, but not really that many. There is a SARS survivor who can't quite believe he has to worry about yet another pandemic, and one which will almost certain kill him after the number SARS did on his lungs ("IKEA Ball Pit"). This is just as well, as I wouldn't want to read 60 stories about people dealing with COVID in various ways. There were a couple of stories that I could relate to, including getting too caught up in stock speculation and almost losing a bundle ("Risk Aversion"), which will happen to the GameStop investors and probably the BitCoin enthusiasts as well. Anyway, it is quite easy to get in over one's head... The other one was a throw-away line in the story "Thong" where the narrator comments on how many people lie about where they were on 9/11. That is no doubt true, but it is equally true that I was working in Manhattan in Penn Plaza on 9/11. I heard from some of the others that there was smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers and got to the window in time to see the second plane hit the 2nd tower. It will be something I remember forever, unless Alzheimer's gets me first.
Given the nature of the stories and the way they jump around, a lot of ground is covered in Binge, but it isn't going to be satisfying if you want to follow through on what happened next or even keep following a character that you found intriguing in four pages but then was dropped. I didn't have time to read through the entire book in one sitting (binge-reading), but I don't think there was a time I stopped with just one either.
Edit (11/15): Having borrowed the e-book version, I can confirm that Coupland leaves the reader hanging in several cases. We never find out what Ned has in mind for Isaac, and it remains a mystery why one man attacked another in one of the last stories in Binge. C'est dommage.
No comments:
Post a Comment