My Weekly Book

Eleanor Rigby - Douglas Coupland

I am very cross about this book. Because I felt it was total, unreconstructed nonsense from start to finish – and in some way knowing, as if Coupland is off on some crazy new tack, deliberately writing rubbish in order to subvert the novel form in some terribly clever and ironic way that I haven’t quite fathomed, silly uncool me. My understanding is that he is not satisfied with this but, after following up the sublime Hey Nostradamus! with this tawdry excuse for a book, one that I found banal, disingenuous and ridiculous from beginning to end, he has actually started to deconstruct not just the novel in general but his own work in jPod. And I’m not having any of it. I loved Microserfs and persist in the belief that it was the high-water mark of his literary achievement. Sorry, mate, but you’re not ruining that for me too.

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This, the 50th book in my 50-book challenge endeavour, is the occasion on which Coupland has finally pushed me too far. As I started to read it the realisation dawned that I really, really disliked it – but I had to force myself to continue because I knew if I put it down I would never pick it up again and it is simply too late in the year and in the challenge to get thrown off course by a bad book. So I had to grimly persevere. This perseverance has led me to conclude that now I really am calling a halt and am not buying or reading anything else he publishes. This saga has gone on too long now and my life is too short, my patience and my bookshelves too limited.

To summarise and to explain the bitter tone of this entry: like so many other people I fell in love with this author’s early work, with the unique quality of his writing and the depth of his perception. I was horrified, like so many others, by the publication of Girlfriend in a Coma but persevered through it, seeing that there were good reasons for its writing and publication, believing there would be something on the other side worth hanging in there for. I struggled through the painful (in more than one sense) long haul of Miss Wyoming and started to feel a bit better about things after All Families are Psychotic. Having stuck with the author while he desperately tried to get his creative shit together, I cheered the arrival of Hey Nostradamus!, claiming that everything was alright again, because Coupland was back on form. Silly me. He was never going to give us that easy a ride and this is sheer, bloody-minded authorial awkwardness written down, if you want to know what I think. From someone who is determined not to be what people want and expect of him, to the extent of trying to claim back and reconfigure his own published works.

The result is that I am now asking myself why have I wasted my time reading anything he has written since Polaroids from the Dead in 1996. This has been going on FOR TEN YEARS NOW. How stupid am I?

Alright, ranting all well and good, now for some specifics. It has long been a feature of the Coupland oeuvre to have somewhat elastic and incredible plots but Eleanor Rigby takes this to entirely new lengths. If I were to summarise what happens you would laugh in my face – and, even in context, it is no better. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I heard myself say out loud more than once and it has the feeling of deliberately testing the reader to me. I don’t know whether the central character’s observations on human existence are meant to be profound, and are just plain banal by accident, or whether banality is supposed to be the point and Coupland is satirising me, the reader, for coming to his door looking for profundity. I suspect the latter. But staggeringly, breathtaking banality is what I experienced, on virtually every page I read. Even the character seems to be recycled – I didn’t have much time for the hapless Wendy the first time round in Girlfriend in a Coma and I’ve not much time for her seeing her re-used here. That’s plot, character and writing style down the toilet – is there actually anything else left to discuss?

Coupland has well and truly shot his bolt with this one. Just in case you hadn’t picked that up… I refuse to allow this to alienate me from his earlier works. I don’t intend to have much more to do with his later ones.

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It’s important to note that this is NOT the conclusion to the 50 Book Challenge, since I still have half of Don Quixote to read before I can claim to have completed it. Oh, well. Here goes… *screws up eyes*

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 11:37 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.