Customer Reviews

Eleanor Rigby

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" is a melancholy song about lonely people, isolated in the world. The same could be said of Douglas Coupland's writing -- particularly this book, "Eleanor Rigby," a look at mortality and loneliness. It's not his finest or most insightful, but it has wit and heart.

Middle-aged Liz Dunn is crabby, lonely and fat. After dental surgery, she seals herself in her apartment with a stack of sad movies, until she receives a shocking phone call. A young man ODed and ended up in the hospital -- and he claims to her son, the result of a drunken tryst when she was only a teenager in Rome. For the first time, Liz finds herself actually having to be a mom.

As if that weren't enough of a shock, Jeremy is also dying of multiple schlerosis. But he is also chipper and upbeat, unwilling to let his impending death get him down. The mother and son start to get to know each other, with the bittersweet knowledge that whatever bond they form is temporary. But Jeremy's mere presence is enough to change Liz forever.

Yeah, it sounds like a Lifetime tear-jerker. Fortunately, Douglas Coupland is able to yank the seemingly ordinary plot up by its acid-wit shoestrings. He isn't exactly known for his chipper outlook on life, but there's a certain poignant optimism to this novel. Its most memorable line is "Death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was," challenging the bleak life that Liz is living, and defining the too-short life her son had.

At times, Coupland seems a bit too flip about Jeremy's M.S. Maybe that humor keeps the book from becoming morbid. The tone is also intimate than his prior books, since it focuses mainly on two people. His smooth, stripped-down writing style is intact, along with dry witticisms. But Coupland's acerbic style hides a surprisingly sweet center.

Liz is quite possibly the funniest lonely person in modern literature -- she takes her private misery and constantly makes fun of it, but not enough to make us take her lightly. And Jeremy is a character who easily could have been insufferable, if Coupland hadn't made him so earnest.

Coupland's ninth novel is an ode to all the lonely people -- especially those who don't necessarily have to be lonely. "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?/All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"

I got my copy in the mail about a week ago and have read it through twice so far. My verdict: It's good. It's quite good. I found it to be more accessible than Hey, Nostradamus!, and the pop-culture fascination that marked earlier Coupland books so strongly is much more muted here. It's clearly a Coupland work -- the same themes of the possibility of redemption, both for oneself and for the world; of loneliness in adulthood; and of the layering of time (the story frequently switches between the present, seven years in the past, and twenty years in the past) are very clearly present. In short, it's a Coupland novel. And when all of the elements of the plot coalesce, events pile up faster and faster, and it's clear that the book is coming to an end, it almost hurts.

Well, well worth a read.

Like the famous Eleanor Rigby, Liz Dunn, an overweight and reclusive thirty-six-year-old woman, is lonely, living in an apartment which is not a home. While she is recuperating from oral surgery, Liz receives a surprising phone call from the police, summoning her to the hospital. A twenty-year-old man named Jeremy Buck has been picked up wearing mesh stockings and black lingerie and suffering from a drug overdose, and Liz's name is on his Medic Alert bracelet. When she meets him for the first time, he greets her as "Mom."

The novel shifts back and forth between 1997, when Liz first meets Jeremy Buck, and her earlier childhood and teen years, and then fast-forwards to 2004. It gives nothing away to say that Jeremy was obviously conceived on Liz's high school trip to Europe when she was sixteen, but she has no recollection of Jeremy's father and no awareness, for many months, that she could even be pregnant. After giving birth during a bout of "indigestion," Liz gives the baby up for adoption, until he finds her twenty years later.

Through this framework, "Generation X" author Douglas Coupland examines the nature of family life and the search for meaning. We know from the outset that Jeremy has multiple sclerosis, but he does not look to religion to provide solace or answers. Instead, he has visions, usually about farm families awaiting the end of the world, visions which bear striking resemblances to some of the issues Liz faces. As Jeremy's MS progresses, his desire to find meaning grows. "Death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was," he believes, and he intends to live it as well as he can--with Liz.

Witty and often mordantly funny, the novel develops an edge of satire at the same time that it strives to be emotionally stirring. When Liz goes to Europe to help with a police investigation, seven years after she meets Jeremy, a comedy of errors ensues, taking the novel further into the realm of absurdity and farce. Although the novel often discusses issues of death and other Gen X concerns, the author uses a consistently light touch, keeping the tone upbeat and avoiding the details of Jeremy's final decline. The novel is not complex, nor is it subtle, with the parallels between Jeremy's visions and Liz's life fully explained by the author. Sparkling dialogue and a conclusion which carries the themes to their absurd conclusions keep the reader going, and the novel ultimately answers the big questions in the song for which it is named. Mary Whipple

Just finished an advance reading copy of Eleanor Rigby. It's very good. It has that feeling of hope in a bland world that seems to have been the theme for the last.. well all of his books. That things needs to change and that it may not be such a terrible thing. They all seem to take place in Vancouver, a place I'm afraid to visit, because what if it's not this sunny sky'ed Ikea Vision of the way scandinavia would have been if we had a better language and weather..

I realise that this might be my own very personal interpretation of Couplands writing, but never mind, the book is good.

Its all about the moments, and Coupland is great at building these unforgettable moment-long scenes that make his characters real and funny and tragic at the same time, with a tiny bit of Us in each and every one of them. Because we might not find radioactive meteorites on the street, but stranger things have happened to all of us.

I finished this book last night, rather emotionally drained, and have been thinking of it all day long. Half-depressed by the mirror it held up to me, and half-relieved by those parts of me I couldn't find in there.

I agree with a prevoius reviewer; how to comment without giving it all away? If you've ever wondered about the boring and mindnumbing part of your everyday existence, read it. You'll start off laughing at all the parts you recognize and then you'll end off knowing there's just so much more to it all. I loved this book.

Douglas Coupland writes so eloquently in Liz Dunn's voice, that it's almost too hard to believe she's the loner she claims to be. I know people who consider themselves to be real "people people" who don't have half the pizzazz, power of intuitive observation and witty repartee that Liz has. The "one Scrabble tile with nothing written on it" is actually the most valuable piece in the game, capable of making something out of almost anything. This book is a joy -- well written and fun to read with a heroine you can't help but like and wonder about when the story ends.

This book is a really good read, if you like Couplands voice and style. It gives you his typical wit and attitude... without much of a real story attatched to it. Eleanor Rigby is (surprise) lonely. She meets her son that she put up for adoption after a trip to Rome. Oh yeah, she's fat. The son has MS. Not that the ending is spectacular, but I won't give it away.

It really is a good book if you like Coupland's witty style, but not if you like involved stories.

Nothing really works in this novel.There's a tangible bite in the lonely narrator's disillusioned musings on life, but Coupland doesn't take it anywhere useful: on the one hand, neither her voice nor her actions betray enough of the self-defeating social mechanisms which could make her total ostracism from society understandable; on the other, and worse, her insights are rarely compelling enough to make her credible as the teller of truths whose wit gets to shine in a climactic scene, or keep us interested in the flimsy yet confusing glimmers of life's mysteries that Coupland seems to want to share with us.

And this just relatively interesting narrator is the only strong point in the book. The other characters are one-dimensional foils to Liz (either angelic or laughably bad), the plot is full of heavily significant coincidences and predictable twists, and the line between funny trivia and would-be profundity is hard to establish.

I was interested enough in Liz to read this all the way through, but by the end I was just going through the gestures.

"All the lonely people..." is the line behind this Beatles titled novel by Douglas Coupland. Liz Dunn is a lonely, overweight, and seemingly non-descript woman to whom rather extraordinary things happen. Her story, told with Coupland's style of post-modern funk, is pretty unbelievable; however, it is one that takes readers on a wild ride across the continent and back again.

Within the novel, we meet Liz's long lost son, her seemingly average family and co-workers, and her European one night stand. The story is rather mundane, but I give it 4 stars for Coupland's succinct and thought provoking ideas on loneliness. This novel is no Microserfs or Hey Nostradamus! but it's an interesting tale of life, loss, erratic behavior, and ultimately, isolation. This is a good novel for an afternoon on the couch, for certain.