Book Review, 2004 (w/ a few 2010 edits)

"Douglas Coupland has aged a little poorly"

Winnipeg Free Press
Sun Nov 14 2004
Page: B9
Section: Books
Byline: Eleanor Rigby

By Douglas Coupland

Random House, 249 pages, $33



Reviewed by Lorne Roberts

DOUGLAS Coupland's novels were part of the formative years of the so-called Generation X, a group of mostly urban, mostly educated North Americans currently between the ages of 25 and 40. (In 2004-- now it's more like 30 to 45)

Coupland's three biggest books-- Generation X, Shampoo Planet and Life After God-- came out one after the other in the early '90s, just as grunge rock and alternative culture were cutting a wide swath through suburbia.

The books propelled Coupland, a visual artist trained at Vancouver's Emily Carr College, to near rock-star status, and made "slacker" a household word.

Like much of grunge culture though, Coupland's work has aged a little poorly. And while his renewed focus on the visual arts has been well-received, much of his recent literary output has met with lukewarm reception. (On August 22, 2010, an article in the National Post named him as one of Canada's ten most overrated writers. Whatever the frick that means.)

Anyway, with Eleanor Rigby, his latest (2004) novel, Coupland does little to prove his naysayers wrong. Like most of his work, there's a lot of soul-searching earnestness going on--it's rare to go a page or two in a Coupland novel without reading a contemplation of why we're here, of what it means to be human, to be loved, and to be lonely--but that hasn't always translated into good literature. And "Eleanor Rigby" isn't an exception. Borrowing its title from the famous Beatles song, the novels tells the story of Liz Dunn, a fortysomething office drone and a lonely, dateless woman who has never known love beyond a drunken fling on a high-school trip to Europe.

Through a strange series of coincidences and near-miracles which coincide with the arrival of some comets, Liz Dunn's life undergoes drastic changes.

The changes begin with the arrival of her dying son Jeremy, whom she gave up for adoption at birth, and who, in a too-easy literary trope, possesses some weird mystical powers that compensate for his illness.

As a touch of magical realism, events such as the arrivals of the comets, Jeremey's powers, and the novel's many strange coincidences could work, but Coupland simply doesn't build the reader's faith enough to accept that these events should all somehow coincide.

And perhaps more importantly, Coupland doesn't build enough interest in the characters or the plot to make the reader really care. Like so much of his writing, you get the sense that the narrator and most of the characters are just thinly disguised versions of the author writing in his diary.

And while that's worked for him before, it seems that, this far into his career, readers can expect more from Coupland.

Coupland isn't a bad writer. In fact, he's often been quite an exceptional one, and his career is probably long from over. It's just that he covers too much all at once, and so his stories, as a result, come across as half-finished. There are lots of good ideas at work in Coupland's books, and even profound truths, but they exist in isolation, and are never quite developed into a full-blown novel.

A lot of this isn't new ground, either, for readers familiar with his previous work. Most of the ideas that Coupland mulls over here, he's already covered elsewhere, and better.

To get a sense of the author at his soul-baring best, try his early novel Life After God. Or check out his recent (2004) two-volume photo project "Souvenirs of Canada". These days, it seems, his best work is in the visual arts.





Lorne Roberts, a Gen Xer himself, is (in 2004) or used to be (in 2010) the Winnipeg Free Press visual arts critic.