Life's Not A Beach

It also led to the worst period of his life. When I ask Garland about that time, in particular about how he was quoted giving a pithy, two-word review of the film (''It's s -- -''), he laughs. ''It's funny I said that. I haven't seen the film since it came out. And when I saw it, I couldn't watch it. It was so different than the thing I had worked on. The book itself has become something other than the thing I worked on.''

Seven years after ''The Beach'' was published, Garland's relationship with the novel that launched his career is still...tricky. On the one hand, he's thankful for the financial security it gave him; on the other, he says he paid dearly for it. ''It completely spun me out,'' he says, his voice lowering. ''What happened to me after 'The Beach' was I didn't just have a depressive episode, I had, like, a total meltdown.''

Garland says that if you go back and reread the first third of his 1999 follow-up to ''The Beach,'' the more writerly and assured, but also more modestly successful ''The Tesseract,'' ''that's me going off the rails. I wrote it during that period. And it's this guy in a hotel room freaking out of his f -- -ing mind. That's exactly what happened.'' Garland needed to rethink things. He met with his publisher, Riverhead Books, and paid back the advance they'd given him for books 3 and 4. ''I wanted to cut loose all obligations,'' he says. ''I didn't want to have to write a book that was going to have to speak to a generation. And the day I paid it back was just the most incredible feeling of relief.''

If fans of ''The Beach'' didn't know what to make of the fractured, paranoid narrative of ''The Tesseract,'' they're even more likely to be confounded by ''The Coma.'' Clocking in at a svelte 200 pages and peppered with woodcut illustrations done by his father, British political cartoonist Nicholas Garland, the dreamy, Kafkaesque head trip follows a man who wakes up from a coma in the hospital (or does he?) after having been beaten up on the subway. Garland describes the book as ''an exploded comic strip'' and confesses that reactions so far have been decidedly mixed.

Either way, Garland already seems to suspect that ''The Coma'' won't be as successful as his previous novels. And now that he's no longer got the pressure of a huge cash advance, he doesn't seem to care. ''Look, an illustrated novel about a guy who's locked in a coma and has a bunch of thoughts flipping through his head, that's never going to push as many buttons as 'The Beach,''' he says, beginning to grin. ''Actually, the chances of me writing a novel as commercially successful as 'The Beach' ever again are just very, very slim.'' And just then, the grin on his face widens into a sly ear-to-ear smile. Because right now, it seems Alex Garland wouldn't mind being the most underpaid, ungossipworthy mid-list writer in the world.