Losing the plot

I finally read Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland which I found a little disappointing. I love Coupland’s early work but his latest work just doesn’t seem to be working for me. I’m not sure if its because he writes the same way as he did when I was fourteen or if its because I simply can’t relate to his books anymore but Eleanor Rigby started to irritate me the more I read it. It started off quite well and small in scale, which is the joy of both Shampoo Planet and Life After God, but took a twist for the worse with a less then believable radioactive meteorite, a trip to Austria and an international incident at an airport.

I enjoyed Coupland’s earlier work because the reader was able to relate to his work in many ways. There’s always been the larger then life elements at play like The Dead Speak chapter in Life After God where Coupland sees the destruction of his surroundings by a nuclear blast and recalls the melting shampoo bottle in his hair salon or the flying, twisted cars on the freeway.

With his last few books however he started to create characters that are larger then life, as in the teen beauty queen/soap actress from Miss Wyoming and the one armed astronaut from All Families are Psychotic. Eleanor Rigby seemed to be a return to form with a lonely women working at a crap but well paid job with no friends, no future, no nothing. However like Girlfriend in a Coma before, which started off in a similar vein of normality, Eleanor Rigby throws a curve ball and takes a less then plausible twist which exhausts all credibility.