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Eleanor Rigby

douglas coupland

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Liz Dunn is one of the world’s lonely people. She’s in her late thirties and has a boring cubicle job at a communications company, doing work that is only slightly more bearable than the time she spends alone in her depressingly sterile box of a condo. Her whole life, she’s tried to get to the root of her sadness, to figure out what she’s been doing wrong, with little success. But then, one night in 1997, everything changes: while standing in the parking lot of a video store, arms full of sappy movies she’s rented to help her convalesce from oral surgery, she witnesses the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. For Liz, this streak of light across the sky is a portent of radical change — and for her, radical change means finally accepting her lot: “I realized that my life, while technically adequate, had become all it was ever going to be … No more trying to control everything — it was now time to go with the flow.” In that moment, and for the first time, Liz feels truly free.

A day after Liz makes the decision to seek peace in her life rather than control, along comes another comet, in the form of a stranger admitted to the local hospital with her name and number inscribed on his MedicAlert bracelet. For the new Liz, the phone call from the hospital feels like “the fulfillment of a prophecy”; the young man, it turns out, is her son, whom she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen. Jeremy shows the scars of his years as a foster child and his most recent drug reaction, but is otherwise beautiful and charming. And when he moves in with Liz to recuperate, it’s as if both of them had been waiting for this moment all their lives.

A lost soul and occasional visionary, Jeremy upends Liz’s quiet existence — shocking her coworkers and family, redecorating her condo, getting her to reevaluate her past and take an active role in her future. But he’s also very ill with multiple sclerosis. Her son’s life-and-death battle induces a spiritual awakening in Liz — then triggers a chain of events that take her to the other side of the world and back, endangering her life just as an unexpected second chance at happiness finally seems within reach.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2004
Places
canada, 

This edition

Format
336 pages, Paperback
Published
May 23, 2005 by HarperPerennial
ISBN
9780007162529
ASIN
0007162529
Language
English
Characters More characters

More editions

About the author

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douglas coupland

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Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.

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Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
39(39%)
4 stars
36(36%)
3 stars
25(25%)
2 stars
0(0%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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lajz
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Een schrijver met een eigen, originele stem, deze Canadees.
Zoals het gelijknamig lied van de Beatles gaat het over eenzaamheid. Coupland is verrassend droog, laconiek en emotieloos in zijn beschrijving van Lizzie Dunn, deze wanhopig eenzame vrouw, en toch, hierdoor wordt het net prangend. De absurde humor trekt je ook mee in haar verhaal.
Helaas vlieg je er bijwijlen ook uit, door de ongeloofwaardige plotwisselingen en momenten van vage, zware mystiek.
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BansheeGoose
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Thought-provoking novel from which I glean Coupland is as multi-faceted an author as the best of them. This particular case of Liz Dunne is a slow-burner, her life is enigmatic and downright strange, as she gleefully ponders over when she found a dead body on the train trains of North Van, and sporadically broke into strangers' houses for kicks. However, the motif of this novel is loneliness, from which Liz is shackled and unfeeling. Went suddenly her adopted son reappears in her life, this ignites a heart-wrenching series of events that brings Liz to a police cell in Frankfurt and beyond. About half way through the book, the timely introduction of a comet sparked the plot into life, and made me question innate views of people and how we choose to live our lives. Great piece.

'Lives in a dream, Waits at the window.. All the lonely people' - The Beatles, Eleanor Ridgby
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royalripper
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Really, I feel this is more of a 2.5, but I'm rounding up because I really enjoyed the first part of the book.

First off, this was a really quick read. Coupland's style is easy to read. There aren't chapters per se, but the book is punctuated in chapter-ettes and the whole thing is divided into 2 sections. I really liked the first section, the second section left me feeling a bit "WTF."

I can see why so many people dislike the narrarator, Liz. She's a fairly unlikeable character but it's her belief in her inherant unlikeableness that makes the fact that she *is* so "blah" less distasteful. The book sets Liz up as a stereotypical spinster -- middle aged, unattractive, unfriended, alone, depressing apartment, zero love life (ever) -- she's completely uninterested in having A Life. Her son (who she had when she was a teen and gave up) comes into her life and breathes color into her life. It's a pretty straightforward story, but enjoyable. I honestly enjoyed the relationship between Liz and Jeremy; it was warm and funny and touching -- everything that Liz believed she was incapable of (or at least believed was out of her reach).

Coupland always throws some weird twists and back stories into his books, so I expected some of that. However, the second half of the book completely jumps the shark. The meteor-turned-radioactive space junk didn't kill the book for me. I was still hanging in there during the whole "why am I in this foreign jail?" scenario. It wasn't even the "meeting the father" scene that takes place halfway around the world that killed it. It's the fact that, after she's spent the entire book telling us how unlikeable she is (outside of her son), she instantly falls into mutual love with the father of her child -- whom she didn't even remember at the beginning. And it's not just that they fall in love, but that he's a super-handsome dentist who just never happened to have a relationship because he was suffering from a debilitating metal disorder until a month before they met. W.T.F.  

The only bit of the second half of the book that I *did* enjoy reading was the retelling of Jeremy's funeral; that scene alone buouyed the book back up to 3 stars territory. Otherwise, I'd recommend just reading the first part of the book and leaving off there.


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creasha
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Really enjoyed this, classic Coupland and delighted to read this morning that he's got a new book out next month.
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SL33P
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I thought this might be quite a depressing book and was slightly worried about picking it up, but the tone of writing stops it becoming so. Liz is actually quite funny and although obsessed with dying and death, seems to function through her life actually quite well. The arrival of Jeremy doesn't exactly turn her life upside down as in some weird way, it almost magnifies her loneliness and obsessions. But it does make her reassess some of her hide-bound mentalities. I loved the whole twist with the meteorite - that episode was written with a humorous smirk that I adored. Overall, a good read and one that I was surprised to enjoy.
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gbupp
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Often times when I go to the library sales, I often find something I would never read on my own and get a pleasent surprise. This is one of those times. There is no Eleanor Rigby in the book, the title is obviously there to remind you that you are reading about lonely people and where do they come from. Well this is nature over nurture as we see father, mother, and son all suffer from self imposed loneliness. While I admire that the book doesn't soft peddle this, and Coupland is an author who's work I have enjoyed from Microserfs does try to give us a realistic portrait here, it still gives us an artificial contrived "happy ending" that I did feel takes away from the book getting there. Read the book, ignore the ending. It has worked for fans of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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zRonin
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I am not surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Coupland is a legend and this book doesn’t disappoint.
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