Eleanor Rigby: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. He is the author of the novels Miss Wyoming, Generation X, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others, as well as the nonfiction works Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.
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Reviews for Eleanor Rigby
561 ratings16 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was the fifth Coupland book I read, & I think its up there as a favourite with Girlfriend in a Coma. I liked the way the story built to its conclusion, although that conclusion was a little too soppy for my tastes. I thought the basic themes of the book were interesting - how people can change those around them, & how parents & the children they had put up for adoption attempt to come to terms with being in one another's lives again. As with a lot of Coupland's stuff, he takes reality & mixes in a bit of fantasy to mess with the story a little, & as I've always found he makes it work as he doesn't take it too far. Good book, nothing too taxing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Douglas Coupland is about my age and I've been reading his books since the beginning of his career. I always feel like I can relate to what he's writing and he's a great writer and story teller.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thank you SO much, Doug Coupland, for everything you write. One major quote from this book: " ...death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liz Dunn is one of the lonely people. The only others she interacts with on a regular basis are work colleagues and her family consisting of her mother, her brother William and her sister Leslie. But that's all about to change when she gets a phone call from the hospital to say they've admitted a patient who had no identification other than a MedicAlert bracelet which had Liz down as the person to be contacted. Arriving at the hospital she finds a young man named Jeremy who turns out to be the son she gave up for adoption after giving birth to at the age of sixteen. Jeremy has primary progressive multiple sclerosis and as he isn’t taking care of himself his girlfriend has kicked him out. Liz agrees to let him stay with her so they can get to know each other better while there’s still time.The novel switches back and forth between when Liz meets Jeremy and several years later with reminiscences from her past including finding a dead body and a school trip to Rome for Liz and her classmates. While it touches on some dark subjects such as loneliness and death the tone of the book never becomes bleak and is often imbued with touches of humour and even descends into farce at one point. Despite the constant time shifts this story is easy to follow and works really well in getting to know the main character. A very quick and enjoyable read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liz Dunn has verged on being invisible for most of her life and she spends much of her time attempting to avoid loneliness. Her dull life is irrevocably altered when she receives a phone call and discovers her name is on the Medic Alert bracelet of a young man she's never met.Coupland is an excellent writer of literary fiction whom I've always enjoyed and I wasn't disappointed when I picked up this novel. He beautifully writes about the issue of loneliness for a middle-aged single woman living alone in Vancouver. Her voice is clear and the passages in which she reflects on herself and her struggle with loneliness are so evocative. The other characters in her life are equally rich that provide flashes of humour and contrast to Liz. The prose is harsh and realistic but beautiful at the same time, and the narrative, while heading to darker places, ultimately arrives in a more optimistic place.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For Liz Dunn, life is fairly routine, dull and lonely. She's single, overweight, works a fairly tedious job and tries to put on a comrade-like face when dealing with co-workers. She doesn't realize how stuck in a rut she is until a Vancouver hospital calls, saying that a young man has been admitted, and the only number he carries happens to be hers. She visits him in the hospital and takes a chance on him, allowing the charming young man with strange, apocalyptic visions of farmers, into her home, changing her outlook of loneliness and life forever."Eleanor Rigby" weaves a fun tale of a woman overcoming her self-made obstacles to regain the life she thought she would never have. As Liz begins to learn more about the mysterious young man, she re-examines her teen years, realizing her life wasn't as bad as she makes it out to be. She traveled to Europe on her own, made a fairly decent amount of money in the stock market, and has a secret that at one time, she thought would be her undoing but instead has made her a better person. I like that she grows as the story progresses, and as a reader, I can see the changes as she becomes more outgoing and learns to allow others into her life rather than keeping them at a distance. Oh, and her conversations with the young stranger are wonderfully written, the kind of talks I wish I could have with people, saying whatever comes to mind and not feeling judged for it.It's well worth reading, and I recommend it highly.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A nicely written book about loneliness. I really felt for the main character.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I must confess to never having heard of Douglas Coupland until another of his novels, 'Generation X', was recommended to me. I read the blurbs and reviews for both books on Amazon, but chose 'Eleanor Rigby' as my introduction to Coupland's writing, because I could idenitfy with the main character, Liz Dunn. I won't tell you how much, but observations about turning bitter at 30 and being 'invisible' struck a nerve!This is an emotional story about a modern Eleanor Rigby, from the Beatles song - 'All the lonely people' - whose blank, uneventful and empty life is changed forever when she is reunited with her son. The first person narrative from Liz is honest, funny, slightly random and bittersweet - she is who she is, although she does harp on about what it is to be lonely a lot. Her family is mildly dysfunctional, or 'messy', as she calls them, and she has no real friends, only colleagues and acquaintances. Jeremy, the son she had at sixteen and gave away, is possibly the most interesting and rewarding relationship she has - but their happiness at finding each other is cruelly brief.I could sympathise with Liz's private thoughts, but I don't think that's necessary to enjoy the story. Coupland's writing is sharp, humorous and poetic (my favourite description has to be of the Gothic architecture in Vienna, which is so intricate that it is almost 'dreaming'), and it's impossible not to believe that Liz is what she states she is: real. My one minor quibble is that the ending is perhaps a little bit too neat, like the romantic daydream of a lonely person rather than a convincing twist, but I won't begrudge Liz her happy ending. A thoughtful book I shall no doubt read again and again, highlighting quotes and psychoanalysing myself as I go.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good book, but not great. I emotionally connected with Liz, a frumperific, lonely thirty-something and I adored her son just as she did. However, I felt that the last fifth of the book kind of took a left turn and I felt like while it made the book come fullcircle, it also lessened it. I don't quite know how to explain it without spoiling the ending, but it just felt contrived. Don't get me wrong, I liked the ending, but that's also the reason why I don't like it. That doesn't make sense, but there you go.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5first line: "I had always thought that a person born blind and given sight later on in life through the miracles of modern medicine would feel reborn.""Look at all the lonely people." Loneliness is definitely a prominent theme of this book: the experience of loneliness; the ways we cloak it; why and how we overcome it. It sounds like a real downer, but it's got some wonderful imagery and humor. One of my favorite quotes:"the gas station...employees were the handsomest men any of us had ever seen, sculpted from gold, and with voices like songs. And there they were, in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, going to waste. They ought to have been perched on jagged lava cliffs having their hearts ripped out as sacrifices to the gods."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is one of those rare books that is both laugh out loud funny, sad and thoughtful, all at the same time. It made me a huge fan of Douglas Coupland.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love the protagonist in Eleanor Rigby...I think I might be her. What else can I say about it? A man writing a woman and doing it so well, this turned me on to other Coupland novels that I didn't feel as connected with. The radical and highly unlikely ending doesn't take anything away from it, either.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wow has Douglas Coupland’s writing changed over the years. He’s gone soft in his old age. (Old age being a relative term.) My favorite quote from Generation X, I think captures the old Coupland well: “You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history will never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unoticed. And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning’s will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.”While of course not all of his novels share the same tone of Generation X none of them come close to Eleanor Rigby.Eleanor Rigby tells the story of Liz, a frumpy, lonely middle-aged woman, whose son she gave up for adoption years ago suddenly shows up in her life, completely, as the book blurb would say, changing everything.Luckily for me, I picked my copy up at our independent bookstore’s closing sale, so I didn’t even read the cover blurb. Plus, it’s Coupland. I love him. And after Eleanor Rigby I still do, but I’m surprised at the different direction the novel took. I had previously pigeonholed Coupland as being like Chuck Palahniuk, an author I dearly adore, who writes in one specific style. But Coupland has broken out of that style, at least for one book, which is something Chuck, as much as I love him, and I do love him, has yet to do.This is a book about the power of family. The positive power of family. We’re not talking All Families are Psychotic, though there is still plenty of dysfunction to go around. No, Eleanor Rigby speaks to the fact that your family is the one place where you can be dysfunctional without judgment. It sounds sappy and it very nearly is, but Coupland manages to throw in enough of his trademark humor to keep the book somewhat level. There are some moments where the plot becomes stretched a little thin, but overall the book is touching, funny, and worth the read.Here’s another four star-er for you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An excellent, bittersweet tale of lost love, loneliness, discovery and tragedy. Told from the viewpoint of a lonely woman whose life is irrevocably changed when her 20-year old son, given up for adoption at birth, finds her and puts her name on his medicalert bracelet. I greatly enjoyed this book, and had a hard time putting it down - so instead I read it cover to cover.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5it's the story of a canadian woman who, in her mid thirties, finally comes face to face with the son she gave birth to/gave away when she was a teenager. it has some very sad moments, but is also 'classic coupland' in the sense that it offers hope and optimism.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5coupland's tribute to loneliness. i can't wait to check out j-pod!
Book preview
Eleanor Rigby - Douglas Coupland
Contents
Eleanor Rigby
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Praise for Eleanor Rigby
I had always thought that a person born blind and given sight later on in life through the miracles of modern medicine would feel reborn. 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. And yet I've read books that tell me this isn't the way newly created vision plays out in real life. Gifted with sight, previously blind patients become frightened and confused. They can't make sense of shape or colour or depth. Everything shocks, and nothing brings solace. My brother, William, says, Well think about it, Liz—kids lie in their cribs for nearly a year watching hand puppets and colourful toys come and go. They're dumb as planks, and it takes them a long time to even twig to the notion of where they end and the world begins. Why should it be any different just because you're older and technically wiser?
In the end, those gifted with new eyesight tend to retreat into their own worlds. Some beg to be made blind again, yet when they consider it further, they hesitate, and realize they're unable to surrender their sight. Bad visions are better than no visions.
Here's something else I think about: in the movies, the way criminals are ready to squeal so long as they're entered into a witness relocation program. They're given a brand new name, passport and home, but they'll never be able to contact anybody from their old life again; they have to choose between death and becoming someone entirely new. But you know what I think? I think the FBI simply shoots everybody who enters the program. The fact that nobody ever hears from these dead participants perversely convinces outsiders that the program really works. Let's face it: they go to the same magic place in the country where people take their unwanted pets.
Listen to me go on like this. My sister, Leslie, says I'm morbid, but I don't agree. I think I'm reasonable, just trying to be honest with myself about the ways of the world. Or come up with new ways of seeing them. I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.
I sometimes wonder how big a clump you could make if you were to take all creatures that have ever lived—not just people, but giraffes, plankton, amoebas, ferns and dinosaurs—and smush them all together in a big ball, a planet. The gravitational mass of this new clump would make it implode into a tiny ball as hot as the sun's surface. Steam would sizzle out into space. But just maybe the iron in the blood of all of these creatures would be too heavy to leap out into space, and maybe a small and angry little planet with a molten iron core would form. And just maybe, on that new planet, life would start all over again.
I mention all of this because of the comet that passed earth seven years ago, back in 1997—Hale-Bopp, a chunk of some other demolished planet hurtling about the universe. I first saw it just past sunset while standing in the parking lot of Rogers Video. Teenage cliques dressed like hooligans and sluts were pointing up, at this small dab of slightly melted butter in the blue-black heavens above Hollyburn Mountain. Sure, I think the zodiac is pure hooey, but when an entirely new object appears in the sky, it opens some kind of window to your soul and to your sense of destiny. No matter how rational you try to be, it's hard to escape the feeling that such a celestial event portends some kind of radical change.
Funny that it took a comet to trigger a small but radical change in my life. In the years until then, 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: bad ideas, pointless habits, robotic thinking. Like anybody, I wanted to find out if my life was ever going to make sense, or maybe even feel like a story. In the wake of Hale-Bopp, I realized that my life, while technically adequate, had become all it was ever going to be. If I could just keep things going on their current even keel for a few more decades, the coroner could dump me into a peat bog without my ever having once gone fully crazy.
I made the radical change standing in the video store's parking lot, holding copies of On the Beach, Bambi, Terms of Endearment, How Green Was My Valley and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, staring up at the comet. I decided that instead of demanding certainty from life, I now wanted peace. No more trying to control everything—it was now time to go with the flow. With that one decision, the chain-mail shroud I'd been wearing my entire life fell from my body and I was light as a gull. I'd freed myself.
* * *
Of course, we're born alone, and when we die, we join every living thing that's ever existed—and ever will. When I'm dead I won't be lonely any more—I'll be joining a big party. Sometimes at the office, when the phones aren't ringing, and when I've completed my daily paperwork, and when The Dwarf To Whom I Report is still out for lunch, I sit in my chest-high sage green cubicle and take comfort in knowing that since I don't remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?
In any event, were you to enter the cubicle farm that is Landover Communication Systems, you probably wouldn't notice me, daydreaming or otherwise. I long ago learned to render myself invisible. I pull myself into myself, and my eyes become stale and dull. One of my favourite things on TV is when an actor is in a casket pretending to be dead, or, even more challenging, laid out on a morgue's steel draining pan bathed in clinical white light. Did I see an eyelash flicker? Did that cheek muscle just twitch? Is the thorax pumping slightly? Is this particular fascination of mine goofy, or is it sick?
I'm alone now, and I was alone when I saw my first comet that night in the parking lot, the comet that lightened my burden in life. It made me so giddy, I chucked the rented tapes into my Honda's back seat and went for a walk over to Ambleside Beach. For once I didn't look wistfully at all the couples and parents and families headed back to their cars, or at the teenagers arriving to drink and drug and screw all night in between the logs on the sand.
A comet!
The sky!
Me!
The moon was full and glamorous—so bright it made me want to do a crossword puzzle under its light, just to see if I could. I took off my runners and, with them in hand, I walked into the seafoam and looked west, out at Vancouver Island and the Pacific. I remembered an old Road Runner versus Coyote cartoon—one in which the Coyote buys the world's most powerful magnet. When he turns it on, hundreds of astonishing things come flying across the desert toward him: tin cans, keys, grand pianos, money and weapons. I felt like I'd just activated a similar sort of magnet, and I needed to wait and see what came flying across the oceans and deserts to meet me.
* * *
My name is Liz Dunn. I've never been married, I'm right-handed and my hair is deep red and wilfully curly. I may or may not snore—there's never been anybody to tell me one way or the other. There was a reason I'd rented such weepy movies on the night I first saw Hale-Bopp. The next morning I was scheduled to have my two lower wisdom teeth removed—two big popcorn-shaped suckers that decided late in life to turn sideways and attack my molars.
I was thirty-six, for Pete's sake. I'd booked off the following week and was preparing myself accordingly: Jell-O and tinned food and broth soups. The videos were part of a verklempt-o-thon movie festival I planned to hold for myself. If painkillers were going to make me mushy, best to take control of the situation. I wanted to blubber shamelessly, and do so for seven straight days.
The next morning, Mother gave me a ride to the dental surgery clinic down on Fell Avenue, and although her life was as empty as mine, she made it seem as if I'd just made her reschedule her Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony in order to drive me. You know, I was supposed to have lunch with Sylvia today. The portable kennel she bought for Empress broke in the first five minutes, and the woman is so weak-willed I have to go into Petcetera when she takes it back and be her bad cop.
Mother, I'd have taken a cab if it was allowed, but it has to be a family member or friend to pick you up. You know that.
It was decades past the point where Mother chided me for my lack of friends. She said, Empress is a lovely dog.
Really?
Empress, from my experience, was a shrill, yappy, neurotic varmint.
You should get a dog, Elizabeth.
I'm allergic, Mother.
What about a hypoallergenic breed, a poodle?
The hypoallergenic thing is a folk tale.
It is?
It is. You can minimize reactions, but that's all. And it's not the fur that's the issue. It's the dander, saliva and urine on top of the fur.
Pardon me for trying to help you out.
I looked into pets long ago, Mother. Trust me.
Our arrival at the clinic put a quick end to that conversation. It was an eight-storey building from the sixties—one of those buildings I've driven by a thousand times and never noticed, sort of like the architectural version of myself. Inside, it was cool and smelled of sanitation products. The print on the elevator's DOOR CLOSE button was almost worn off. I pointed it out to Mother and said, I bet there are a few psychiatrists in this building.
What makes you say that?
Look at the button.
So?
In the elevator industry, a DOOR CLOSE button is called a pacifier button. They're installed simply to give the illusion of control to your elevator ride. They're almost never hooked up to a real switch.
I still think you should get a dog.
I have to admit that I love hospitals, clinics and medical environments. You enter them, you sit in a chair and suddenly all the burden of having to remain alive just floats away—that endless brain-churning buzzing and second-guessing and non-stop short-term planning that accompanies the typical lonely life.
I'd never met the day's exodontist before, a hearty Australian who rustled up jokes and cheer even for my sad little face under its laughing gas mask.
So where'd you go to school then, Lizzie?
Liz. Here in North Van—Carson Graham for high school.
Ho ho! And after that?
Oh God. BCIT. Accounting.
Marvellous. Lots of partying there?
What?
The anaesthetist clamped the mask harder onto my face.
You know. Letting loose. Getting down.
My life is not a beer commercial . . .
That's when I went under. A second later I opened my eyes and the room was empty save for a nurse putting away the last of a set of tools. My mouth felt packed with sand. I smiled because it had been such a great thing to be conked out like that—one moment you're dealing with an Australian comedian, the next you're . . . gone. One more reason to no longer fear death.
In the car on the way home, my conversation with Mother consisted mostly of her sighing and me mumbling like a faraway radio station. She dropped me off outside my condo, and before she raced off to Petcetera she said, Really think about a dog now, Elizabeth.
Let it go, Muddah.
It was a hot dry day. August. The building's entryway smelled of sun-roasted cedar-bark chips and underwatered junipers. Inside, it was cool, smelling instead of the lobby's decaying nylon rug. Once inside my place, three floors up, I had the eerie sensation that I was watching a movie version of a still room. There was nothing in it that moved or denoted time's passage—no plants or clocks—and I felt guilty to be wasting all of that invisible film, ashamed that my condo was so boring. But then again, the right kind of boring can be peaceful, and peace was my new perspective on the world. Just go with the flow.
My head throbbed and I went into my bedroom and laid it down on a cool pillow. The pillow warmed up, I turned it over to the cool side and then I fell asleep. When I woke up it was past sunset, but in the sky up above the mountain there was still some light and colour. I cursed because an afternoon nap always leads to an endless night. I touched my face: both sides swollen like the mumps. I fell back onto the mattress and my tongue explored the two new salty, bloody socket holes and their thorny stitches.
* * *
The Liz Dunns of this world tend to get married, and then twenty-three months after their wedding and the birth of their first child they establish sensible, lower-maintenance hairdos that last them forever. Liz Dunns take classes in croissant baking, and would rather chew on soccer balls than deny their children muesli. They own one sex toy, plus one cowboy fantasy that accompanies its use. No, not a cowboy—more like a guy who builds decks—expensive designer decks with built-in multi-faucet spas—a guy who would take hours, if necessary, to help such a Liz find the right colour of grout for the guest-room tile reno.
I am a traitor to my name: I'm not cheerful or domestic. I'm drab, crabby and friendless. I fill my days fighting a constant battle to keep my dignity. Loneliness is my curse—our species' curse—it's the gun that shoots the bullets that make us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers.
Where does loneliness come from? I'd hazard a guess that the crapshoot that is family has more than a little to do with it—father's a drunk; mother's an agoraphobic; single child; middle child; firstborn; mother's a nag; father's a golf cheat . . . I mean, what's your own nature/nurture crapshoot? You're here. You're reading these words. Is this a coincidence? Maybe you think fate is only for others. Maybe you're ashamed to be reading about loneliness—maybe someone will catch you and then they'll know your secret stain. And then maybe you're not even very sure what loneliness is—that's common. We cripple our children for life by not telling them what loneliness is, all of its shades and tones and implications. When it clubs us on the head, usually just after we leave home, we're blindsided. We have no idea what hit us. We think we're diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium. It takes us until thirty to figure out what it was that sucked the joy from our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even while our exteriors made us seem as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness.
* * *
The message on my answering machine the next morning was from The Dwarf To Whom I Report. His name is Liam.
I hope your surgery went okay, Liz. You didn't miss too much here at the office. I’m having Donna courier you over a few files for you to pick away at over the next week while you recover. Sorry I missed you. Call any time.
What? I didn't miss anything? Heaven forbid anything even quasi-dramatic might occur in the cubicle farm of Landover Communication Systems . . .
Liz, there was a fire . . .
Liz, we all got naked at lunch hour and interfered with each other . . .
Liz, those voices in my head? They're real.
Well, the thing about Liam is that he actually enjoys his work. This is inconceivable to me. On a few occasions I've tried to mimic his cheer, but no go. To me a job is a job is a job, and before you know it, poof! it's all over and they're throwing your ashes off Lions Gate Bridge.
Liam feels many things I don't, for example a sense of mission as well as indifference to the emotional lives of others, including me. This is possibly to be expected, as I'm plain, unsalvageably plain. When I was born, the doctor took one look as he held me, bloodied and squalling, and asked the nurse if there was anything good on TV that night. My parents looked at me, said, Well, whatever,
and then discussed what colour to reupholster the living-room sofa. I'm only half joking.
People look at me and forget I'm here. To be honest, I don't even have to try to make myself invisible, it just happens. But evidently I'm not invisible enough to Liam, especially if he thought I might like to pick away at a few files
while I get over these teeth.
* * *
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 look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I've kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn't totally depress me.
If I could go back in time two decades and give just one piece of advice to a younger me, it would be, Don't worry so damn much.
But because young people never believe old people, I'd most likely ignore my own advice.
If there's a future Liz Dunn out there in, say, 2034, may I respectfully ask you to time travel back to right now and give me the advice I need? I promise you, I'll listen, and I'll give you a piece of my philodendron to take back with you so you can grow your own plant there.
* * *
I ended up sleeping until the next afternoon—surgery can really take a whack out of you. My verklempt-o-thon was well in progress when my older sister Leslie dropped by, intruding, upon one of the