For as long as I can remember, I have believed in the inter-textuality of things. That things overlap, loop under and around, show themselves again where you least expect them. This is on my mind tonight as I sit in a living room of dear friends on Whidbey Island here in the last week of my fall break.

I blame Douglas Coupland.

One of the random highlights of my trip has been the jaunt to Vancouver, where I got to see a former student and also track down the newest book by Coupland, Generation A, which doesn't drop in the US until November.

The novel takes place in a near future where bees are extinct. Seemingly out of nowhere, five individuals in different places are stung by bees. They are quickly whisked away for experiment and observation to see what drew the bees to them in hopes of bringing the bees back (you see, a world without bees is a world without all kinds of things that required pollination). Somewhere in the story of the five, the story takes on the subject of stories themselves. As I read and finished the book tonight, I saw strands of Donald Miller's new book surface. I saw moments reflecting what I've read in Chabon's essays. I heard my own thoughts and heard the voices of my own friends.

"Every word we speak is autobiographical," one of the characters in the novel states.

I'm probably the kind of guy that says something is profound too quickly. Maybe there's a lot of profundity out there. I'm not sure. But I will say, here near midnight on a chilly October evening, that Coupland's new book says something vitally important, something about the nature of life and community and storytelling and the story that we are all of us telling.

"What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning," one of the five says at the novel's beginning. That comment is followed by nearly 300 pages of chaos and confusion. But in there is something, there are many things, in that story that deserve thought and rumination. Life will be better with it, I believe.