Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1525289 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
Liz Dunn isn't morbid, she's just a lonely woman with a very pragmatic outlook on life. Overweight, underemployed, and living in a nondescript condo with nothing but chocolate pudding in the fridge, she has pretty much given up on anything interesting ever happening to her. Everything changes when she gets an unexpected phone call from a Vancouver hospital and a stranger takes on a very intimate place in her life. From here the plot of Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby skyrockets into a very bizarre world, rife with reverse sing-alongs and apocalyptic visions of frantic farmers. The style and plot paths are very identifiably Coupland--slightly mystical, off-kilter, and very, very smart. Ultimately a novel about the burden of loneliness, Eleanor Rigby takes its characters through strange and sometimes nearly unimaginable predicaments.

Fans of Douglas Coupland's later novels, particularly Hey Nostradamus! and Miss Wyoming, are bound to like Eleanor Rigby. Like many of his novels, the journey is strange and unexpected but you come out at the other end with a snapshot of a sardonic and bizarre but ever-so-slightly hopeful place. --Victoria Griffith

From The Washington Post
If you were asked to imagine a lonely person, you might picture a character very similar to Liz Dunn, the protagonist of Douglas Coupland's latest novel, Eleanor Rigby. Liz has a boring job, a depressing, featureless condo and no friends. She's overweight, inexperienced with men, pessimistic about the future and spends her days like someone in an airport terminal waiting for a flight to depart, finding ways to make the minutes pass more quickly.

And what would you do with such a sad lump of a character? Naturally you'd want to introduce someone exciting and unpredictable into her life, someone to shake things up with his quirky ways and odd ideas and irrepressible joy at being alive. But Jeremy, Liz's long-lost son, isn't just zany and devil-may-care, he's smart and incredibly handsome and unreasonably charming, yet very patient and kind, and, best of all, he's terminally ill! What better way for Liz, fat and depressed and lonely, to reconnect with her will to live than by unearthing her primal mothering instincts for an utterly perfect child with a death sentence?

Veering so close to the territory of lighthearted yet poignant romantic comedies and quirky, feel-good movies could make any author nervous. No one wants his novel to bear a striking resemblance to the next whimsical vehicle featuring those kinder, gentler parts Jack Nicholson has been playing lately.

Yet in movies like "As Good as It Gets" and "About Schmidt" and "Something's Gotta Give," the Nicholson character has substantial flaws, which we learn through observing him in his natural habitat: He's obsessive-compulsive. He kicks little dogs. He's jealous of his daughter's fiancé. Coupland's lead characters, on the other hand, are quirky and sharp and self-aware, and we learn about their flaws only when they tell us about them directly -- but we still don't believe them.

"I'm drab, crabby and friendless," Liz informs us early on. But aren't drab, crabby, friendless people the last ones to admit that they're any of the above? No matter, since we never witness Liz behaving in an outwardly crabby way, not even when one of her compassionless siblings drops by unannounced.

"I used to be street trash," Jeremy tells Liz upon meeting her for the first time, but nothing about him is remotely trashy. Even when he recounts his awful childhood, which he spent being passed around among foster homes, he manages to sidestep any raw expressions of rage at being given up by his mother. Even when he discusses his struggles with multiple sclerosis, he remains tough and patient and condemns those who believe that the disease should allow them to behave like victims. Even when his girlfriend flies into a rage and throws his boom box out the window, he politely requests that she calm down. In fact, Jeremy spends most of the novel delighting and entertaining everyone he meets, then cooking them a tasty meal. If this sort of behavior is a product of the foster system, we should all be so lucky as to be abandoned by our parents.

As readable and entertaining as Coupland's writing has been since his widely read first novel, Generation X, was published in 1991, there's no conflict here, and nothing moves the story forward because it's not clear what any of the characters really needs. Liz and her son are not only exactly alike, they're utterly in step with each other and agree on the proper course of action at every turn. Coupland offers his usual insights about existential angst and life being what you make it, but somehow the satisfaction of seeing two characters clash, only to recognize that they complement each other, is missing: These two merely match. Without any little rough spots and moments where they bring out the worst in each other, there's really nothing interesting or touching about their mutual affection.

The most dramatic moments -- Jeremy falls and hits his head, signaling his impending decline; Liz is accosted by secret agents at the airport -- are recounted after the fact, from a great distance. Again, imagine a Nicholson character, without the flaws, telling the camera that he eventually became a happier guy, but we miss the scene where he hugs the dog or accepts his daughter's fiancé or falls in love with Diane Keaton.

Even the Eleanor Rigby of the Beatles' song shows us her desires through her actions: She picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been; she keeps her face in a jar by the door. Not only doesn't Liz Dunn offer any insights about where "all the lonely people" come from or belong, she has no real hopes or dreams to speak of, no secret self that she cherishes, no false self that she presents to the world. Ultimately, we don't know any more about her than she knows about herself. We don't make any discoveries or learn anything new or feel a sense of satisfaction over what she's been through. In the end, it's as if we've spent a few pleasant enough hours in the terminal with her, biding our time until our flight departs.

Reviewed by Heather Havrilesky
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Author of 1991’s seminal Generation X, Canadian author Coupland has a lot to live up to. Eleanor Rigby’s detractors claim that Coupland has lost his touch, and they dismiss his heroine as derivative and unrealistic. Others feel the author is in top form and praise him for making the dull Liz shine. Coupland’s dialogue raises another point of debate; one critic derided him for his stilted phrases, while another found the same phrases wonderfully engaging. Eleanor Rigby is unlikely to find as large a following as Generation X did, but it may prove enjoyable for those who can put up with Liz’s crankiness.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

(this is about the Canadian edition)
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.

All the lonely people
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'm that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it."
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