Adequate life, big moments

FictionFew narrators are as candid as Liz Dunn; aged 42, living alone, and freely admitting to being lonely. Her family, which consists of her beautiful sister, smart-alec brother and tough-as-nails mother, don't provide much comfort. But they can all draw on a ready supply of neat one-liners as a way of dealing with life - and each other.

Liz is sharp, bright and funny; she is also a hurt outsider whose only fault is trying to deal with the daily business of survival: "Like anybody, I wanted to find out if my life was ever going to make sense, or maybe even feel like a story." Late in the novel, Liz is told by a bewildered policeman that her way of "looking at the universe" is "unique." It is - as well as strange, poetic, offbeat and oddly practical, given as she is to using scientific facts to back up her comments.

Her routine job, which serves to fill up her days, sees her staring at a computer screen. Her nights are spent watching DVDs and thinking, usually counting the minutes until she can safely expect to die. Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, whose eight previous novels include such intriguing titles as Girlfriend in a Coma and All Families Are Psychotic, is very funny, almost too funny. Yet beneath the gags, his message is loud and clear: lots of people endure miserable lives, with no one to listen to their lamentation.

Seven years before she writes the journal that develops into this novel, Liz, then aged 36, had her wisdom teeth removed. Her mother chooses the occasion as the cue for suggesting Liz gets a dog. As mother and daughter enter the elevator, Liz notices that the print on the Door Close button is almost worn off and remarks to her mother: "I bet there are a few psychiatrists in this building." Mom is unimpressed. Yet Liz continues: "In the elevator industry, a Door Close button is called a pacifier button. They're installed simply to give the illusion of control to your elevator ride. They're almost never hooked up to a real switch."

This is the type of observation Liz specialises in. It is a device cleverly used by Coupland in the creation of a character who feels so much more at ease when deflecting all conversation from herself and her emotions. Whenever she finds herself in a situation in which she may be asked to reveal something of herself, she offers either a fact or a random observation.

Eleanor Rigby, for all its bluntness and tragedy, is a curiously uplifting book in that it confronts each disaster head-on. Liz is not so much defiant as immune to shock. Existing as an invisible person in a world where appearances count more than profundity has helped to toughen her: "People look at me and forget I'm here."

Her self-contained life waiting for the weekend to be over may be quiet - or "adequate", to use her own word - but it has had its highlights, such as the time as a 12-year-old when she discovered the dead body of a man who was wearing a skirt. She describes it as "my big moment". Well, the next big moment happens when she is summoned to the hospital bedside of a young man of 20 who turns out to be the son she had given up for adoption at birth.

The narrative continues, sustained by Liz's wisecracking tone, which never quite conceals the hurt she feels. Her life with her son, Jeremy, immediately settles into a happiness that might have overpowered the book - had the boy not been terminally ill. Two other big events - a meteorite find and a journey to Vienna, via arrest at Frankfurt Airport, to meet a policeman who knows the father of her son - bring Liz and the novel out of the ordinary.

Neither a feel-good romp, nor a dirge, this is a likeable life-and-death tale that, in common with its heroine, balances practicality with healthy doses of whimsy laced with reality, and vice-versa.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Eleanor Rigby By Douglas Coupland Fourth Estate, 249pp. £15.99