A slave of solitude

Loneliness is a pearl of great price among novelists. Fiction, drawing so much of its inspiration from groups, communities and societies, nevertheless cherishes the idea of solitude, of the hero or heroine outcast and apart, thrown upon their own resources for spiritual endurance. Think Robinson Crusoe among his goats, Jane Eyre roaming the corridors and attics of Thornfield, Fanny Price learning the value of non-inclusiveness from her selfish Bertram cousins or the peopled wilderness created by Dickens in Bleak House.

Douglas Coupland’s latest novel invokes one of the 20th century’s best known loners in its title. According to the Lennon and McCartney song, Eleanor Rigby ‘picks up the rice in the church where the wedding has been’, or ‘waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door’. Life for Liz Dunn, Coupland’s heroine, is not lived on terms quite as dismal as these, though by the story’s opening she has clearly reached that dire stage of solitude in which a notional Wordsworth- ian bliss is replaced by the need to define and codify the whole phenomenon for fear of going completely insane. What she calls ‘fine-tuning my loneliness hierarchy’ leads her to blame ‘the crapshot that is family’ for some of the problem. Her whole previous existence, however, seems to have been marked by an oddly slapdash, half-hearted approach to events which for anyone else would demand dramatic levels of personal commitment and social interaction.

As a 12-year-old in Vancouver, for example, picking blackberries by the railway line, Liz stumbles across a man’s body neatly cut in half, the upper portion clad in a lumberjack shirt, the lower wearing a floral-print skirt and knee-high boots. Having checked out his sexual identity, she flags down a passing train and returns home triumphant with her grisly adventure and the Tupperware box full of berries, only to face her family’s mildly expressed revulsion tailing off into utter indifference.