What a disappointment! I will start off stating that I really wanted to love this book. It was advised to me by a friend, and it is named after a Beatles song. This latter point is actually the reason why I picked this particular book by Coupland, and not another one.

This was my very first book by Douglas Coupland. As a result, I had no idea what to expect style-wise but I had high hopes. The book begins with the introduction of the main character, the self-proclaimed lonely Liz Dunn. The description of some events from her youth makes you feel that she could have avoided loneliness: she definitely lived things not everyone does. But Liz’s life really changes when she is contacted by the son she gave birth to as she was just a teenager and gave up for adoption.

I was expecting a very, very sad book. A depressing one, even. But it was not. I suppose that’s where the major disappointment comes from. Do you have Eleanor Rigby, the song, in mind? It is such a sad, claustrophobic song. There is a real dark atmosphere. And I couldn’t find this in the book. On many occasions, Coupland’s style reminded me of Nick Hornby’s. And Nick Hornby is very good at writing very lightly about serious subjects. Since Douglas Coupland said he was inspired by the Beatles song to write this book, I think that he should either have written something sadder or call his book something else. I wasn’t moved by Jeremy’s story (Jeremy being Liz’s son) and I had a feeling that Liz sort of appreciated her loneliness, as if it were part of her and she did not really want to see things change. Sure, she is surrounded with stupid, annoying people: her siblings, mother and colleagues. But don’t we all? And yet we’re not necessarily lonely. It felt as though she was trying too hard to be lonely – and she kept reminding us throughout the novel: she’s a fat, ugly, lonely woman. I didn’t feel she was someone I could relate to. On the contrary, she annoyed me because she liked the comfort of her poor, boring life. As the end shows, it didn’t take all that much for her to actually have a life and stop being lonely. So she was just a whining character who was not willing to try, in my opinion.

Finally, as far as the story goes, after the big thing happens to Jeremy (I don’t want to spoil the fun if you plan on reading the book), I think that the plot goes downhill and doesn’t make much sense anymore. What’s with the whole meteorite story line? And the very end is too quick. How can such a lonely, unwilling woman jump into a relationship as if it were natural? And then, why didn’t she do it before then? Of course, that man is special, but still.

So overall, I was really disappointed with this book but I believe that’s because I expected something else.

Довольно сложная книга при всей кажущейся простоте. Ну, что может быть такого сложного в истории рыжей толстушки, которая давным-давно живет одна, мучается на нелюбимой однообразной работе и набирает стопки кассет, чтобы скрасить свой вечер? Наверное, ничего. Но Коупленд с этим не согласен. Во-первых, на голову толстушки может упасть метеорит (и это не метафора), а, во-вторых, от непредвиденных поворотов судьбы никто не застрахован. Вот и превращается история, которая вначале может показаться скучной в гротескный детектив с расследованиями и преследованиями. Хотя, честно говоря, сложность не в этом, а в том, чтобы настроить "пропускные способности" своей души на то, чтобы принять ту лавину эмоций и идей, которые на тебя обрушивает автор. А уж он, не смотря на "развлекательную" оболочку, не поскупился. "Элеанор Ригби" (кстати, не ищите такую героиню, это нарицательное имя одинокой женщины) - это тот редкий случай, когда книга не будет отпускать вас еще долго. И дело абсолютно не в сюжете, а вот в размышлениях "а что бы я сделал(а)? а правильно ли поступила героиня? и, в конце концов, в чем смысл жизни?".

Еще хочу от метить, что не смотря на то, что роман также выходил в серии "Альтернатива", здесь нет никаких сцен, которые могут расстроить трепетных фиалок. Ну, разве что они уж очень трепетные. Есть убийства (без подробностей), неизлечимые болезни, смерть... и много-много надежды на будущее и любви.

8 / 10

“...waking up on Saturday morning and realizing that I have two days to kill until work begins - the cold chunk of light between the curtains and the window frame that tells me I have no life. No matter how hard I tried coping - or how well I sometimes seemed to be doing - loneliness was still the dominant mood that tinted and diminished everything. “

I loved this book so much. I am Liz Dunn. This is my life.

I really liked this book. The characters are unusual but are still relatable. The story is funny, sad and bittersweet with a good dose of dark humour. If you want to read a story that is not run of the mill and is truly original I recommend this book.

Didn't finish - couldn't finish. I mean seriously, the woman is called to the hospital to see the son she's never met, goes home to clean house and then joins him to crawl on the side of the freeway before bringing him home to make some eggs? If this was given to me in a workshop I would have suggested he go to McDonald's University instead of getting his MFA. "All the lonely people" would rather be alone than spend time with this book. Paul McCartney wrote about a spinster, not a spastic.

Eleanor Rigby is one of Douglas Coupland's best novels, featuring one of his most sympathetic and likable main characters - Liz Dunn.

The book tells the story of Liz reconnecting with her son Jeremy, who she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager. Liz is a desperately lonely, unhappy woman, and through Jeremy, she's able to wake up and reconnect with the concept of having a life.

Liz makes a unique main character, if for no other reason than she's extremely overweight. It's only through reading this I realized how few books feature overweight people as MCs. And her weight is not a plot point, but he provides a somewhat unflinching look at how it impacts her life.

Of course, much of the book deals with the concept of lonliness, which is a theme that crops up over and over again in Coupland's writing. It's a sad, sweet, melancholy look of what it's like to be an adult with no real friends or connections.

An excellent read and a must for anyone thinking of diving deeper into Coupland's library

“What if God exists but he doesn’t really like people very much?”

It’s 2am. I’m willing back an emotional outburst. It manifests itself in the usual way—lump in the throat, shaky hands. Damn. I hate this and then again…. Do you ever feel like the Tin Man? It’s a horrible feeling. ”I feel like that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it.” Exactly

It’s been a dozen years (at least) since I’ve read Coupland. I remember being inspired by Generation X and feeling like I was a piece of living history. This was our time---He was writing about me. Oh, to be young and so self-absorbed.

You can’t go home again, right? That’s the saying? Yet here I am feeling that Coupland has nailed it. He gives me faith. Time is whimsical and cruel.” Uh huh.

Maybe I should talk about the book. Right. Stay on track. In front of me is a piece of notebook paper with page numbers and quotes scribbled all over it. I do this when I read something that elicits gooseflesh. 91, 92, 128, 130, 139, 117, 118, 179, 180, 57, 58, 229, 1. So, I’m not exactly sure how to review this book. I mean, I could do the standard book jacket rant, but that’s not me. I’m one of those irritating reviewers that likes to talk about how the book makes me feel and how it relates to me (see: self absorbed).

This book mentions 4 hidden layers of personality, the public self, the private self, the secret self and the dark self. “The fourth is the dark self – the one that drives the car, the one that has the map; the one that is greedy or trusting or filled with hate. It’s so strong it defies speaking.”

Lately, I’ve been relating to that 4th self. That frightens me a little.

This book is about loneliness and settling and then light and hope and visions and ’A new order, cold white lights that burn and die.”

It’s about farmers and fate and family and mystics. It’s seeing beauty in the ordinary and appreciating the surprises. It’s about painting one wall red.

I loved this book. I love Coupland for stringing together words, for giving me my faith and still letting me be a skeptic.

2nd sentence: ”Just imagine looking at our world with brand new eyes, everything fresh, covered with dew and charged with beauty—pale skin and yellow daffodils, boiled lobsters and a full moon.”

It’s a good day.

I am not Liz Dunn, though I do identify with her. Obviously, I don’t have a twenty-year-old son whom I gave up for adoption. But I can understand her almost ascetic obsession with solitude. I too am a solitary person; I tend to prefer the company of a good book and its characters to the company of good people. Unlike Liz, though, I must confess to having a social life. I have friends, though I may not “hang out” with them as often as most people do. And while some people may question its validity, my online interactions are a large part of my social matrix as well. So I enjoy being alone, but I am not lonely per se.

Loneliness and the often unexpected connections between people echo throughout Douglas Coupland’s works, but they come to the forefront in Eleanor Rigby. Liz has carefully ensconced herself in a bubble, fending off all but the most resilient of her relationships. And even these are routine, predictable affairs: her mother badgers her and tries to interfere with her life; her sister pities her for not wanting the life that her sister has but isn’t happy with; her brother accepts her but is wrapped up in a family and business of his own. The only wildcard in Liz’s life was the child she had while she was still in high school, a child who shows up twenty years later, precipitating a crisis of loneliness in Liz’s life.

One reason I enjoy Coupland’s novels so much is that his characters always feel like people. They talk like people who are close to each other talk, in meandering conversations that branch into multiple topics as each person’s words spark new connections in others’ minds. It’s not at all like the straightforward dialogue of most novels, wherein dialogue is mainly a mechanism for advancing the plot. And it comes with a challenge, because of course fiction isn’t real life, and so one must balance the realistic dialogue with the needs of the story. It’s this ability to strike an equilibrium between the craziness of real life and the need for fiction to be believable that makes Coupland so compelling for me.

This is a stark contrast to Coupland’s plots, which make very little sense and are always coated in a glossy layer of absurdity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Take the relationship between Liz and Jeremy for example. Jeremy’s reappearance in Liz’s life comes with a fatal complication: multiple sclerosis (MS). There is no happily ever after for these two, and Liz must face the fact that their reunion will be short-lived and complicated. I find it interesting that there is never any tension between these two. Liz accepts Jeremy’s reorganization of her life with equanimity. Similarly, Jeremy does no wrong. For a kid who had a rather rough time of it in foster homes, he seems to be largely untroubled. He doesn’t seem to have an ulterior motive, doesn’t seem to want to just take advantage of Liz, steal her stuff, and leave. Despite his awful luck in the foster home lottery, he somehow managed to turn out as a decent individual.

Similarly, in the real world, Liz’s incident at the Frankfurt airport would have much more serious consequences than a slap on the wrist and a thorough decontamination. In Coupland’s novels, bad things happen, but they always seem so carefully calibrated to some precise degree of badness. This is how I know Coupland, for all his caustic observations of modern society, is an optimist and not a cynic. His endings are happy endings—not for every character, and maybe not even for the main character. People experience loss and sadness and death, but by the end of the book, something has changed for the better. Coupland’s novels are sneaky reminders that it’s never too late for hope, not even after an apocalypse, or peak oil, or the return of one’s twenty-year-old son.

And then we come to the ending, which is, for me, the least satisfactory part of the book. It’s just dumb: Liz flies to Austria to meet someone she barely remembers from her past, and then they fall in love. I’m almost tempted to conjecture that Coupland lost a bet and was forced, as a condition of his loss, to write the ending this way. But I’m sure he had his reasons, not the least of which is the need to rectify Liz’s loneliness, which has returned since Jeremy’s death. Still, I think he could have done better.

Coupland is renowned not only as a writer but as a visual artist as well, and I think this influences his writing to a great extent. That is to say, his books often seem to make more sense when viewed slightly from a distance, as a whole and complete entity, rather than viewing them up close and in a sustained, linear fashion. Paintings, unlike stories, are not meant to be read from left to right, page to page. And actually, I would probably say Coupland’s novels are more like sculpture or an installation piece than any two-dimensional art: different when viewed from different angles, with little jaggy bits sticking out.

Eleanor Rigby the linear narrative is contrived and somewhat disappointing. Eleanor Rigby the work of art is stimulating and moving. It’s the perception of this difference (whether conscious or not), perhaps, that makes it possible to be a fan of Coupland. Because people who pan his books as contrived or curiously constructed are entirely right. This isn’t literature so much as it is visual art translated into the written word. The fact that this appeals to me is ironic, because I work at an art gallery but do not take much time to look at the art.

I suppose this hasn’t been a review of Eleanor Rigby so much as a kind of rumination on my Coupland fandom. Try as I might, I’m finding it hard to pick out specific parts of Eleanor Rigby to praise, despite being able to find a few things I could criticize. I suppose I really enjoyed Jeremy’s newfound interest in selling mattresses. I don’t know if that’s just because it feels so quotidian and Couplandy, or if I secretly yearn for a series of novels that follows a mattress salesman. Mostly, though, I think Eleanor Rigby crystallized some of my conflicting thoughts and attitudes towards Coupland. He’s a better storyteller than he is a writer, but for all their flaws, his stories always seem to have nougats of truth.

n  n

The main character Liz has a reflective clarity in her loneliness that just keeps the story so interesting as she’s met with increasingly surreal happenings. This book is both candid and existential, such a good combo.

Douglas Coupland is one of those authors I think I’m supposed to really like, but with whom I’ve never quite clicked. I know he does the kinda snarky, sorta postmodernist literary fiction that’s usually my cup o’ tea, but for some reason he’s never joined the ranks of those authors whose work I regularly seek out. My first encounter with Coupland’s work was his first – and best known – novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I read this in the late 1990s, at the point when I was entering my late 20s and not feeling much affinity with the generation that was supposed to define me. I was (am?) an Xer, but the book itself – despite being about my people – didn’t do much for me. A quick look at my bookshelf tells me that I also read Shampoo Planet, about which I remember exactly nothing. My first exposure to Coupland’s work actually came before either of these books, listening to half of Microserfs in audiobook form on a road trip to rock climb in Yosemite National Park. I have fond memories of that drive, but it’s highly likely the book may not have had much to do with it.

All the hype on Coupland’s work tells me we should be literary BFFs. But here we are, with 2004’s Eleanor Rigby being only the third of his books I’ve read in twenty years. And the hell of it is, even after reading this generally pleasant book, I’m no closer to figuring out just what I think of him. The book is completely, resolutely fine. I liked it. It was a fast read. I laughed out loud once or twice. But I never fully engaged with the story in the way that makes a difference to a reader.

The thing is, though, I should have. Liz Dunn, the book’s protagonist, suffers from the kind of loneliness that should have resonated with me in a big way. I’ve written elsewhere in these reviews about struggling with anxiety and depression throughout much of my life, and there was a time in my late 20s and early 30s when I felt a sort of unrelenting loneliness, even though I had good friends and a satisfying career. The really remarkable thing is how accurately Coupland – via Liz – pins down that specific feeling:

"One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass – that I’ll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I’ve wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure."

I know that feeling exactly, the constant looking back and looking forward and dwelling on the present and being dissatisfied with all of it. (For me specifically there’s also a lot of what the late, great David Foster Wallace admitted to in a Rolling Stone interview, where he claimed to never have had a genuine human interaction because he was so plagued with social anxiety that he constantly stood one step outside himself, evaluating how his interactions with other people were going instead of just experiencing them. But that’s a story for another therapy session.) But somehow, despite the feeling that I knew Liz, her story was entertaining without really hitting home.

And again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it should have. Because at the point where Liz’s loneliness seems to be transitioning into despondence, she receives an unexpected visitor: the son she gave up for adoption after a drunken fling in Italy at the age of 16 resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. Jeremy is now 20, has multiple sclerosis, and needs a place to stay. Liz takes him in without hesitation, and the act of becoming both a mother and a caregiver gives her purpose and meaning. Remarkably, Coupland manages to do this without ever dipping into schmaltz or sentimentality, at least partially because Jeremy himself is such an irrepressible figure. Rather than allowing himself to be a mopey victim of his debilitating condition, Jeremy gets a job as a salesman at a mattress store, gleefully selling its customers on “sleep systems” they don’t really need. I found it impossible to dislike Jeremy and equally improbable not to root for Liz as she haltingly emerged from her shell. It’s really, really good stuff.

All of this plays out breezily, even after Coupland fast-forwards seven years and Liz finds herself arrested in Germany on suspicions of terrorism, which involves a plot twist whose intricacies I won’t reveal here. The fact that I found myself willingly entertaining these plot contortions (which also include a meteorite crash, Jeremy’s occasional bouts with prophetic visions, and flashbacks to Liz’s days in Italy) is a credit to the thoughtful way Coupland balances humor and pathos, and the sensitivity he pays to each of his characters – even Liz’s diminutive boss Liam (aka, The Dwarf to Whom I Report).

But as I say, this book never clicked with me in the way I thought it should. I’m not sure what to chalk it up to, but I suspect it might have to do with this simple truth: I’m not lonely anymore. I can remember those feelings, but at a remove, like a photograph that’s started to fade in the sun. And because I don’t remember them fondly, Liz’s struggles carry perhaps just a bit too much verisimilitude for comfort, even though I found much in the book to otherwise enjoy.

Which leaves me pretty much where I started: I still don’t know what to make of Douglas Coupland. Perhaps it’s enough to say that I’m willing to try another of his books to see if that’s the one to make a difference.

Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net

Witty, funny and, in some ways, very close to home. A treatise on loneliness.

"You have to decide whether you want God to be here with you as a part of your everyday life, or whether you want God to be distant from you, not returning until you've created a world perfect enough for Him to re-enter."

I got more from this than I care to admit. Loneliness is something no one wants to admit to and it's scary and sad to think of a person's life slipping away year after year with nothing to look forward to and no one to share happiness with. It's tragic and also very real. It's also a great fear of mine and most people probably.

I would point out how implausible most of the events in the book were; but it was so heartwarming and careful as to make some of the most outrageous things seem like a real possibility. Sometimes truth is stranger then fiction anyway, right? And i like to believe after so many years of uneventful life, Liz was due a big dumping of eventful events....Did that make sense?

FYI, I always pick identify pretty quickly an actor/actress to picture when ever I read. Melissa McArthy was Liz in my head...I think it's pretty genius if ever they make a lil movie :)

Liz was pretty strange but aren't we all sometimes? I have more love for a character that thinks differently (not cute quirky) than someone who has a one-track mind with no other peak inside their life and personality. If I just want to hear about a girls infatuation with some guy I can go to a Justin Beiber concert, am I right?

I also love the actual message that I got from it. I've heard it before but this said it differently and I appreciate that. Don't throw you're life away because you think this is all there is. Don't give up before you've even tried. Go after whatever you want. Whatever answer your searching for wont find you inside the four walls of your house. You've got to get up, go outside and look. Try something new, something you're scared to do, just because.

The alternative is not having anything to show for your life in the end. Whenever that comes.