Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
If you know anything about music you know Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby is about loneliness. The classic (and great) Beatles song brought isolation and depression to the top of the charts. (As a side note, Squeeze may be one of the best at bringing sad lyrics to the masses in such melodic, catchy pop tunes. Listen to Up The Junction if you have any doubts.)
Sure enough, Eleanor Rigby follows the life of Liz Dunn, a fat, friendless woman approaching middle-age, who resides in a sterile condo, watching Law and Order reruns. In 1991 Coupland’s Generation X exploded onto the cultural scene, for lack of a better cliche. This was the cool book of my formative years and it was liberating to see the oversize pages with textbook like definitions on the edges of the pages, surrounded by images or logos like ‘Economy of Scale is Ruining Choice’ and ‘Eroticize Intelligence’. I still think of corporate cube farms as ‘veal fattening pens’ because of Coupland.
And it wasn’t just the gimmicks that made Generation X so good. The writing was solid and it felt like he was dragging you into the digital future of adjectives. Coupland’s ability to fuse the new cultural reality with traditional narrative was inspiring. He spoke the language of films like Repo Man and Buckaroo Banzai and the music of Nirvana.
So is this a review of Eleanor Rigby or Generation X you ask? I think you have to look at where Coupland entered the literary landscape to see the maturity of Eleanor Rigby. Coupland had stepped in to speak for an entire generation and in many ways got trapped there in my opinion. It took a lot of time (both in written form and otherwise) for Coupland to finally step away from that legacy and start to stand on his own without the reverberation of Generation X roaring in his ears.
I’ve liked most of Coupland’s novels, but there has been an ebb and flow. Eleanor Rigby brings Coupland back to the forefront with a cast of quirky and likable characters set against the themes of death and loneliness. As you would expect there is plenty of darkness in the novel, from disease to dysfunctional families and a broken foster care system. But amid all that charcoal is a very bright light, a lilting cadence and dialog, as well as a simple yet fantastic and twisting plot.
Eleanor Rigby reminds you how good you have it, and how many people don’t and to never lose that perspective.
