Douglas Coupland Looks At Loneliness

'Eleanor Rigby: A Novel by Douglas Coupland. Random house Canada. 249pp.


     Douglas Coupland is my favourite novelist. His novels often take place in North or West Vancouver, places I've often gone to. It's nice to read a novel that happens near where you live. Also his novels are easy to read. So you don't have to stress your mind wading through some incredibly dense work. Last but not least they remind me of t.v. dramas, but they're so much deeper, funnier and sadder than most stuff on the box.
   'Eleanor Rigby' published in 2004 takes off from the Beatles' song of the same name. "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been," sang the fab four about fifty years ago. "Lives in a dream." And the song's chorus asks "All the lonely people/ where do they all come from?" Coupland's novel like the Beatles' song is about loneliness.
    When the novels opens, Liz Dunn a very lonely middle aged person is living, sort of, in a North Vancouver condo. Then the Hale-Bopp comet lands on the north shore and signals better things to come. Liz takes us back in time to a distant trip she took to Italy with one of her high school classes. Here, she ended up in a party that took place on   a roof, and met a man. Then something happened.
     "I'm overweight and my clothes are serviceable," Dunn explains to us. "They're usually loose fabrics because they conceal my roundness. Men af all ages don't notice me, period. To them, I'm a fern." So life looks grim for this plain Jane.
    And her family is not very supportive. But then a stranger intrudes and transforms her life.
    The novel here, I think, goes astray. The Beatles' song 'Eleanor Rigby' ends on a depressing but realistic note. Coupland's novel gives us an old-fashioned Hollywood style ending where all of Liz's problems vanish.
      But in the end so what? The novels entertains and also Coupland drops all sorts of observations on life into the story. Now that I've unplugged my t.v. I'm going to keep reading Coupland's work. It beats watching the dramas on the box anytime, unless they're written by Dougals Coupland, that is.