Why you should read Eleanor Rigby

Based on guess which Beatles song, this new novel by Douglas Coupland takes the line about "all the lonely people" and runs with it. Liz Dunn is a woman with basically no friends - she's got a sister, brother and mother who all try to interfere in her clockwork routine, a dull, well-paid job, and has never had a boyfriend, and just to really hammer it home, she/Coupland tells us, frequently, about how unattractive and fat she is.

So far, so meuh. You just know that her regular round of metro-boulot-dodo is going to be busted up good by some seismic event in her life, which in this case is the arrival on her doorstep (metaphorically) of her long-lost son Jeremy. He's charming and handsome and impulsive and sociable, all the things she's not, and of course he teaches her to smell the flowers, see the joy in the world etc. (there's one great scene where he gets her crawling down the central strip of a highway). But this is Coupland, and Coupland's beautiful youths are rarely long for this world, and so it is with Jeremy, who has terminal (primary progressive) MS.

Hmm. While I appreciate the transcendant and fleeting beauty of human life as much as the next person, Coupland really has got a jones for his dying/comatose heroes and heroines, and I'm not sure why he's often so egregiously cruel to his characters. They're always such suffering saints, dangerously reminiscent of little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose death I particularly looked forward to when we were reading it in class at school. (Did anyone else find Simon Legree kind of sexy, by the way? Just me then.)

Oh all right, that's a pretty unfair comparison. Coupland is nowhere near that schmaltzy - but he's certainly got a sentimental/mystical streak (see the execrable and nigh-on incomprehensible Life After God) which can often get the better of him. If anyone remembers Mazzo, the cancer patient from The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Robert Cormier does dying characters a lot more interestingly.

But enough about Jeremy - Liz is our narrator, and she's the one we care about. I thought Coupland's m-to-f ventriloquism was better in Girlfriend in a Coma, to be honest, but Liz as a character remains almost always likable and convincing, although as a woman I'm not so sure. On occasion Liz sounds more like a middle-aged man dressed in a fat-lady suit than I would like her to, and the fact that s/he is constantly going on about her lack of physical charms smacked of the author protesting too much, trying to remind us that yes, the narrator is still an overweight woman.

And who, by the way, ever goes on about their flaws and demerits in real life situations when they can't see the person they're communicating with? Imagine if this happened on bulletin boards, or over the phone: "Hi, I'm John, just thought you ought to know I'm losing my hair and have a below-average size penis." I mean, what? Every single human being on this planet has vanity, except Liz, apparently. Again Coupland errs on the side of saintliness (or rather martyrdom) for Liz; it's pretty dehumanising not to allow your character vanity. And if she's so very, very, unassailably unattractive and doesn't care, what's she doing in high heels? It's not for comfort, that's for sure.

(Hmm. I'm wondering if Coupland has actually been a lot cleverer than I'm giving him credit for and the protesting too much - about not caring she's a minger, that is - is not meant to be convincing, but a sort of cry for help. Hmm. Maybe I'm underestimating Coupland - he's a pretty clever man most of the time.)

Anyway, despite all the nitpickery above, the reason you actually should read this book is because, as usual, it's sleekly and slickly written, the story is interesting and involving, and it just flies by. If you love Coupland you won't be too disappointed (although it's not a patch on the excellent All Families Are Psychotic) and if you don't you'll be surprised (especially after this review, hem hem) by how much there is to love. And either way, I can vouch from personal experience that it's the perfect book for a long train journey.