Lonely people want to be dead, yet we’re still not quite ready to go—we don’t want to miss the action; we want to see who wins next year’s Academy Awards.

tDoug Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby is tailor-made for dedicated readers fond of literature-focused social networking sites and who maybe, you know, sometimes think they should have more face to face interaction with other human beings but friends, in flesh and blood, can just be so exhausting. Liz, narrator and nondescript cubicle dweller, looks dormant on the exterior but engages in the whirling, detailed thought processes of a lonely person who can watch her surroundings with impunity because most people have forgotten she’s there. She returns to her tomblike condo at night and, well, thinks some more.

tStill, even the most careful lonely people cross fortune, and Liz’s path includes German prisons, dead bodies near the railroad tracks, and space detritus falling at her feet.

tAnd therein lies Eleanor Rigby’s nagging problem. Coupland overuses absolutely groan-inducing plot developments, not just tugging at one’s heartstrings but grabbing on tightly and wrenching the goddamn hell out of said strings until you want to kick the author in the balls to make him let go. If he’s not tugging he’s swerving left to right with the dues ex machina like a sugar-addled kindergartner describing a trip to Mars. And why? I’m not entirely sure. The book doesn’t need all that tugging and swerving. Liz’s internal dialogues are excellent, and Coupland’s portrayal of a lonely person’s reflections and perceptions could carry the book on its own. The plot distracted me from the characters.

tThe last thirty pages almost raised the rating to three stars, but…nah. I’d be lying. Had the book been longer I might have given up. I’ve heard The Gum Thief is great, so I’m going to check out that one. Coupland’s got promise. Eleanor Rigby, however, shoots off like a Roman candle just wet enough to disappoint.

surprising how much i enjoyed this! 3.5 for sure

I’m quite sure I just read the best book of my year-I absolutely loved every page of Eleanor Rigby. I haven’t read a book that has resonated and delighted me quite like this since Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. Eleanor Rigby is odd and yet relatable, heartwarming and also depressing, confusing and kind of brilliant, full of existential crisis and yet somehow incredibly hopeful. This book was so rich and held it all for me and yet also felt like such a light and easy read. I love the way Coupland thinks and experiences reality and our inner world as expressed through these characters and this plot. As a Canadian living in the same Fraser Valley as the characters in this book, I especially really enjoyed the local BC context. I’m excited yet kind of nervous to read my next Coupland title. This was my first..will his others land like this one did for me?

3.5. Took me a long time to finish this one. I found Liz’s tales through the first half of the book hard to follow and tiring to read. All the stars are for Liz’s contemplative thoughts about herself, life and death, and for the way she loves Jeremy, which I found quite beautiful. Passages about our existence were remarkable and actually comforting - I’d go back to re-read just those sections.

Liz is single, in her forties and lonely. Her story is about seven years ago when she was in her late thirties and single and lonely and discovered the son she had when she was sixteen and gave away for adoption. He undermines all the defences she erected as a single, lonely person. He is a charming person who has mystical visions, talks about his multiple dreadful foster families, and can sing songs backwards. And he is dying of MS.

Jeremy is an original character who grabs your attention as soon as he appears. As for Liz, his mother, she is a magnet for disaster, finding a dead body when she is still a child. These two power the novel.

As original and thought-provoking as Shampoo Planet (and Coupland also wrote Generation X); it contains wonderful lines such as:
"I'd been sieving the contents of my days with ever finer mesh, trying to sort out those sharp and nasty bits that were causing me grief" (p 3)
"Loneliness is ... the gun that shoots the bullets that make is dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers." (p 9)
"My relief after they had gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal." (p 28)
"Visiting another country is really just the same as going into someone's house to soak up its aura." (p 66)
"He was the wonderful Christmas present, and I was merely the box, the wrapping paper, and the postage stamp." (p 97)

A funny, moving and profound novel.

Coupland’s style in this novel is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s approach to story-telling: short sections not necessarily presented in sequence; the narrator talking directly to the reader and commenting on events with humour and wit; characters and incidents out of left field that usually tie into the whole – but not always.
Eleanor Rigby can be read on a surface level, fairly comfortably, in spite of the odd happenings and visions scattered throughout. But because it’s a Douglas Coupland novel, the surface of the story is constantly disturbed by events that have meanings we can’t always put our finger on.
In essence, it’s a surprisingly simple story. Liz Dunn, a lonely, fat, drab and often ‘invisible’ person, has her life taken over by her delightful long-lost son, Jeremy, who has a ‘winning smile’ and is dying of acute MS. Several years after his death, she meets his father for the first time in nearly thirty years. That’s it.
But added into this are all sorts of oddities: a murdered man found cut in two, with his lower half in a dress; Jeremy’s visions of farmers hearing a voice from the sky, his inherited ability to sing songs backwards, and his natural talent for selling beds; an appalling cultural trip by American teenagers to Italy which seems to teach them nothing; a pocketed meteorite that causes an entire airport to be evacuated; an Austrian who finally discovers a pill that stops him accosting well-dressed women in the street and telling them they need to find God.
Coupland is an unusual writer: a kind of postmodern theologian (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) whose parable-type stories hint at far more than they explain. As a person he doesn’t appear to profess any spiritual leanings, yet the longing of the human being to find God permeates his books.
Almost at the end of Eleanor Rigby, Liz Dunn has a vision relating to the other visions scattered throughout the book, in which she says to the farmers: ‘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.’

Coupland's books are so unique. I've read three so far and I just have a feeling, that all his books are so out of the ordinary. I wonder, if all this weird questions that appear in his books are basically his questions…and all these random thoughts are his. I love this kind of writing-writing the same way someone speaks. Just laying it all out in the open. Without thinking it through. This story is so captivating and interesting and my favorite so far. But I plan on reading them all. I almost got goose bumps when I read some sentences, because they felt familiar. I recognized myself in them. And at some point this story made my eyes wet.

thank u saya for letting me keep this on my book shelf for 2+ years <3

so wacky and weird and im obsessed with protagonists who so are so okay with being alone and ugly and fat and are strong bc of all that. liz, you amaze me, i wish the ending bit in vienna had been a bit longer but overall this was so bizarre and long but also short and fun

A very interesting read. My only complaint is that as I work with individuals with OCD, there is some misinformation. Individuals with OCD do not act on thier impulses and they actually make concerted efforts not to so much so it is distressing to both that individual and to thier loved ones. But aside from this error, it was a good read.

I think this is my second Coupland book and it was a good read. Unique story-line and good follow-through despite a hokey plot twist at the end. It was another easy read which is perfectly fine with me since my brain is too tired nowadays too follow anything more complicated. Still, I want to be entertained, not bored and this book fit the bill perfectly. As far as a mini-description? I guess it’s a story about a woman’s journey and self-discovery. It’s not truly woman-centric though so don’t let that scare you. Pick it up if you like to read modern-day fiction novels.

Meh. I kind of didn't remember reading this. I do remember thinking, really? Then I told Rachel that I didn't really know why she passed this one along, and she also didn't remember reading it. Unmemorable and kind of relying on my (nonexistent) pathos a little much. I don't know how to review books.

This is a step away from Coupland's usual; there's the same piercing prose, the same uncanny finger on the heart of modern life, the same engrossing characters, but the language has been stripped down to essentials. While I've always loved his dense, allusion-filled writing, it's equally enjoyable to see him strive for a cleaner style. The narrator is Liz Dunn, a pragmatic, sharp-tongued, utterly lonely woman who receives a phonecall which, for a little while, changes everything. The beauty in this story is getting into Liz's head, and experiencing it the way she does; there are hints of the mystical, supernatural themes which often appear in Coupland's work, but it's less literal this time around and more aspirational. As usual, his greatest strength is in creating round and engaging characters who both entertain with wit and pull the reader in with their very real sense of isolation. Highly recommended.