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Print
One of the Lonely People
Eleanor
Rigby. By Douglas
Coupland. Bloomsbury, 2004. 249 pp.
Reviewed by Alison Andrews
January 30, 2006
I feel
that I owe Douglas Coupland an apology. Mr. Coupland, I apologize for avoiding
your work until now. Since Generation X was published in 1991, I had the
impression that Coupland was one of those authors who was trying too hard to be
hip, striving to be the ironic voice of his generation—after all, he gave a name
to a whole group of young people who were nameless and supposedly aimless.
Coupland coined clever terms like “McJobs” and “microserfs” to describe the
alienated nineties world in which we found ourselves. Surely his books were
forgettable, of the moment, and harboring no hidden depths.
Hidden
Depths Abound
I was
guilty of judging a book by its cover—or an author by his media coverage. I read
Coupland’s ninth novel, Eleanor Rigby, with amazement at the author’s
skill at creating a narrator whose voice alone made me want to keep turning the
pages. Liz Dunn is a forty-two year old spinster who describes herself as “drab,
crabby, and friendless.” If that were true, of course, the reader wouldn’t want
to listen to her story. In fact, Liz is one of the funniest, most engaging
characters I’ve encountered in the pages of a book in a long time. Liz’s dilemma
is that because she’s plain and overweight, she has been lonely her whole life,
like the Eleanor Rigby of the Beatles song from which the novel takes its title.
She says, “I feel like that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it.” No one
has ever discovered the interesting person underneath the drab exterior—until
Liz, while recovering from oral surgery, gets a call from a local hospital
summoning her to the bedside of a young man with her name and number inscribed
on his MedicAlert bracelet. At that moment, her life becomes less lonely and
more bizarre.
Goodbye, Loneliness
It turns
out that the young man, Jeremy Buck, is Liz’s son, conceived during a class trip
to Rome when she was 16, in an encounter she cannot remember at all. Jeremy has
been following Liz for some time. This seems scary at first, until he explains:
“I’ve been with so many screwed-up foster families in my life that before I went
to meet my real family, I wanted to make sure you weren’t a psychopath like the
rest of them.” Liz and Jeremy begin to connect, to learn what it is to relate to
another human being. The only problem is that Jeremy has an aggressive form of
multiple sclerosis which is ravaging his body and causing him to have
apocalyptic visions. The cheesy soap-opera plot is beside the point. Coupland is
using a trite series of events to highlight the real theme of the
book—loneliness in an increasingly alienated modern world which has lost touch
with God—and the acid wit he gives to both Liz and Jeremy is designed to keep
the reader from becoming depressed or groaning at the improbability of some of
the plot twists.
Learning How to Feel
All this
is not to say that Eleanor Rigby is a perfect, seamless novel. There are
plenty of potential objections. For one thing, I doubt any of us have ever met
anyone as lonely as Liz who is as funny and observant. Of course, how would we
know, unless we had gotten to know a real-life Liz whose goal in life was to be
invisible? Coupland’s point is that sometimes it takes extraordinary events to
break down barriers between people. Others might point out that Jeremy seems
remarkably well-adjusted for someone who has endured a lifetime of abuse. He
doesn’t even get angry at Liz for giving him up for adoption. This is a valid
criticism, but I was left with the impression that the lack of emotional
fireworks is due to the characters’ unfamiliarity with their own feelings. These
are emotionally stunted people who are careful not to be too vulnerable.
Jeremy’s approach is to cook and to paint Liz’s walls in an effort to be useful
so that he won’t be rejected. Once Liz realizes this, she runs red lights all
the way home to put her arms around him and tell him, “You don’t have to paint
walls any more, Jeremy.” It’s one of the most touching moments in the book.
A
Strange, Hopeful Vision
As the
novel reaches its conclusion, things get weirder. I found it hard to concentrate
on Jeremy’s visions, which are of farmers awaiting instructions on the end of
the world. Then Liz’s experience with a chunk of metal that falls at her feet
from outer space, seven years after Jeremy’s entrance into her life, adds a plot
twist that ends things too neatly to bear any resemblance to reality. Still, I
was already rooting for Liz’s future happiness, so I went with the flow that
Coupland’s smooth writing was creating. The idea of loneliness as a modern
disease that is worth fighting will stay with me longer, though. Eleanor
Rigby made me ask, in the words of the Beatles song:
“All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?”
Douglas
Coupland’s novel suggests that all of us, whatever our degree of loneliness, do
have someone to which we can belong. That’s an idea that isn’t ironic and hip:
it’s hopeful.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2006,
Alison Andrews
-------
Alison
Andrews lives near
Fort Worth, Texas, with her husband and daughter. She and her husband lead
the small group ministry for their church. At any given moment, she's either
reading a classic novel or singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” over and over...and
over.
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