Coupland, Douglas - Eleanor Rigby

Four and a half years ago, when I first began attending Imago Dei Community Church, I met with my pastor, Rick McKinley, at a Starbucks at a newly built strip mall in a Portland suburb. I don’t remember much of the discussion we had that day, just catching up, mostly, but he told me I should read a book: Douglas Coupland’s Life After God.

Few books have affected me spiritually as much as Life After God. Coupland wrote thoughtfully of the innate need that humans feel to search out a higher being, something above themselves, and wrote from a perspective devoid of typical Christianity. One of the most beautiful paragraphs I’ve ever read about God was not wrapped in theology or seminary knowledge, but in the second to last page of Life After God:

“Now - here is my secret:

I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I will ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

After 20 years of church and youth group and the Bible being whittled down to bite-size, self-help morsels for me, I felt fresh and in love, and it had taken a writer from outside the church to remind me of this.

I also took to the task of reading everything Douglas Coupland wrote, and I’ve read everything that he has written since. I’ll tell you this: none of his other books hit me the way that one did. This is, in part, because Life After God seemed more personal, while Coupland typically writes obvious fiction.

Coupland’s last two novels, Hey, Nostradamus! and All Families are Psychotic, were disappointing. All Families are Psychotic, despite its brilliant title, lacked intimacy. Hey, Nostradamus! started well but ended on an unsatisfying note. I did not have high hopes for his newest release, Eleanor Rigby, but I did get that twinge of hope that occurs when I see the name of an author that has intensely affected me on a book that I haven’t read.

One of the best aspects of Life After God was that the loneliness of Coupland’s characters, which is present in all his books, is strangely comforting, especially at the novel’s conclusion. Eleanor Rigby brings back that sense of lovely loneliness and combines it with other Coupland trademarks: apocalyptic visions, mysterious turns of events and off-handed wit.

Coupland’s protagonist and narrator is Liz Dunn, a woman who repeatedly makes it clear that she is fat and plain, preemptively preventing the reader from turning her into the generic hero or heroine that we all picture when we read books. She describes herself as invisible, a blank, but in a funnily resigned way. Liz’s life is changed in the summer of 1997, when she first sees the Hale-Bopp comet and decides that she will stop seeking certainty in her life, and instead seek peace. A few days later, she receives a phone call from a local hospital: a young man she has never met has her name and contact information on his medical bracelet. And that’s before the truly crazy stuff starts.

I didn’t enjoy Eleanor Rigby as much as I enjoyed Life After God, but it was Coupland’s best novel in years. In a day and age when fresh and new writers grab public attention, Eleanor Rigby reminds us that the writing is an art form that evolves and develops with time.

Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland: B

Jordan Green considers Douglas Coupland to be one of his biggest influences, which in no way insinuates that Jordan Green can actually write. He wrote this as Mount St. Helens lightly erupted just across the Columbia River.

Posted on February 8, 2005 5:15 PM