promotion

at, fortyish, and friendless, Liz Dunn is an unlikely heroine, even for an oddball-savant like Douglas Coupland (Hey Nostradamus!, Microserfs). But Liz's wry, crotchety commentary is the heart of Coupland's eighth and arguably best novel, Eleanor Rigby.
   When a hunk of meteorite lands at Liz's sensibly shod feet and the son she'd given up for adoption twenty years earlier turns up in a nearby hospital, her drab, solitary life is suddenly upended. Her son Jeremy's apocalyptic visions transform Liz's once-beige existence into a kaleidoscopic circus act.
   From his home in Vancouver, the man who popularized the phrase "Generation X" talks to Nerve about his latest creation, the self-help book he'll never write, and why he'll never be a blogger. — Emily Mead

How did you conceive of a person so resigned to solitude that, at age forty-two, she still sleeps in a twin bed?
I find that the seed of the next novel always comes from the last. When Heather in Hey, Nostradamus! said, "Oh, look at me, I'm Eleanor Rigby," something went ding! "Liz Dunn" is actually a good friend of mine, but she's really tiny, like the size of a lima bean.

If Liz came from Nostradamus, what will come from Eleanor?
My next novel is actually ninety-five percent done right now, but it's a sequel to [1995's] Microserfs. Now they work for Electronic Arts, the computer-game company.

What's changed for the Microserfs in the past ten years?
The managerialization of digital creativity, Google, China, massively available porn and gore, the triumph of email…

Why don't you blog?
Back in '91 or '92, I kept a diary, but I realized I was doing my life in this modular, paragraph-y way, thinking "Is this a diary entry or not?" I'd end up deleting all these big chunks of life when their only crime was that they weren't bloggable. Also, I type with two fingers — I took metalwork instead of typing.

So what's bloggable, then?
When you bump into someone from high school and they weigh two hundred pounds. The whole thing about Liz is that she lives a very quiet, interior life. A lot of the changes in life are not car crashes or insane situations — you can be at a stoplight one day and realize something that happened fifteen years ago went to your taproot and you're a different person. Nothing happened, but everything happened. So in this strange way, you're always going forward. I really wanted this book to have a stillness — not that it's an anti-blog or anything, blogs are great — but I don't think it's conducive to fiction.

Liz sometimes feels that "people look at me … and wonder if I merit a fully stocked condo and late- model Honda Accord." What makes a person "worthy"?
Barbara Ehrenreich did a wonderful essay [arguing] that loneliness was good for the economy — that if you atomized a culture, then each new unit had to buy new stoves, new fridges, new towels, new everything, and that it was fiscally advantageous for society to be fragmented. It's not so much a question of what makes a person worthy, but rather, who decides what set of emotional conditions is best for General Electric.

Loneliness comes up frequently in your books. You're about the same age as Liz; are you a particularly lonely or alienated person?
Well, everyone is lonely. I don't really feel alienated, but I used to be terrifyingly lonely in my twenties and it just completely, totally, utterly fucked me up. I think thirty to thirty-five are the best years because as you get older, you still feel loneliness, but you know what it is, and you know it'll go away. It's like bruising your leg — it doesn't have the power to terrify you anymore.

Why are those years so bad?
We live in an incredibly transient culture. You go from the intense socialization experience of school, then move to the other side of town — or to Los Angeles — where you're dumped into this culture where it takes an incredible amount of money just to live. You're stuck finding your own way and not quite sure who's good or evil, who's using you, "Is it me or is it the alcohol?" And in the midst of all this, you're feeling totally disconnected from a lot of people. Are you clinically depressed? No! You're just lonely, and no one told you what it was or how to identify it, the shapes or colors or forms of it, so you think you're going mental. And because people tend to hang out with people their own age, everyone around you looks great, like they all just stepped out of a shampoo commercial or something, so you think, "They couldn't possibly be experiencing all this crappy shit that's inside of me." Before you even discuss it with people, you've already shut yourself down. And that's your twenties!

Has online dating changed the way that people find and relate to each other?
From all the couples I've met, I'd say that online dating has eradicated loneliness more than any invention in history. So maybe your twenties aren't as bad as they once were. But I doubt it. They're still grim.

Is Liz any lonelier than most people, or just more accepting of it?
When you go to the (by now, huge) self-help section, the books all say, "Don't be lonely, have solitude." Liz has been through all that, and walking through the forest communing with birds didn't work. At her late age, I think she's saying, "I'm not going to feel sorry for myself. I'm going to make it palatable or survivable, but I'm not going to give you any of that wandering-around-the-pond-and-breathing-the-fresh-air."

If you had to write a self-help book, what would it be?
It would probably be about new ways of looking at old situations. One thing that's intrinsically a part of my personality is to take something that you thought you already knew and say "Maybe it's different than you think." Is the solar system just a bunch of rocks circling this blob of molten helium called the sun?…I sound like I'm stoned, but I'm not.

What gives away a lonely person?
Joan Didion once said that it's someone buying exactly one lamb chop. As a broad social trend, I really think it's hanging out in coffee shops. Before Starbucks, there was no place that lonely people could go by themselves without feeling like freaks. Now they glamorize it, like getting a latte while being lonely will make people wonder, "Ooh — who's that mysterious person?" I look at people with laptops in coffee shops and think, "Oh, they're writing their first screenplay — and they're lonely."  n°

To buy Eleanor Rigby: A Novel, click here.