'Rigby' proves pleasant and occasionally profound

Eleanor Rigby
By Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury, 249 pp., $22.95

Who would have thought that Douglas Coupland would grow into himself so nicely? Thirteen years ago, when he published the demographic-dubbing ''Generation X," Coupland's prose jittered with the desire to codify 20-something life -- a desire so uncontainable that it spilled over into the novel's margins, in the form of glossary entries and cartoons that were often more compelling than the characters themselves.

One might have guessed, circa 1991, that Coupland's future lay in pop-anthropology, that he would become an author-as-talking-head, called upon to extemporize via satellite whenever Generation X faced some new challenge. Thankfully, this was not to be. Instead, the Canadian author's work has grown more intimate with each passing book; no longer concerned with being the voice of a generation, Coupland now excels at the generation of a voice.

''Eleanor Rigby," his latest, succeeds almost entirely because the first-person narration of its protagonist is so charming and so real. Essentially the story of how a middle-aged spinster finally comes of age, throws off her isolation, and begins living her life, it is told with abundant wit and a deceptive simplicity, courtesy of a sardonic office drone named not Eleanor Rigby (the title is borrowed from a Beatles song about loneliness) but Liz Dunn.

Liz is the sort of woman who is on intimate terms with her own unhappiness, and with nothing else. She can enumerate how and when different types of loneliness are likely to accost her, and knows endless ways to wallow or find temporary escape.

Her condo is drab, her mother and siblings treat her with scorn and pity, and she long ago abandoned any hopes of finding greater happiness. Coupland does a masterful job of crafting Liz's internal world, from her love of watching TV actors portraying corpses to her contemplation of how big a planet might be created by smooshing every animal that has ever lived into a giant ball. Liz's every fantasy, routine, and idle musing is memorable, and yet Coupland never overreaches. Liz seems every bit her own creation: an immensely likable, admittedly pathetic woman whose life will, in the course of these pages, be turned completely upside down.

The shake-up comes in the form of a young man admitted to a local hospital after an accidental drug overdose. His medical bracelet bears Liz's name, and thus she meets her son, Jeremy, for the first time. He's charismatic and troubled, and has an aggressive, debilitating form of multiple sclerosis that causes dreamlike visions.

Liz put him up for adoption when she was 16, after getting pregnant on a school field trip to Rome, on a drunken night she can barely remember. Mother and son bond immediately, uncomplicatedly, and Liz brings Jeremy home to live with her.

Within an hour, he's breathing life and zaniness into Liz's airless existence; before they even get home, he's persuaded her to crawl along the shoulder of the highway with him, toward the setting sun, as dictated by one of his visions. Although it is the deterioration of his brain that grants Jeremy these waking dreams, Liz is fascinated nonetheless, and takes to writing down every word, transcribing every image Jeremy relates.

She's giddy with pleasure over her son, and their relationship is almost dreamlike, even as Jeremy's decline accelerates. There's no hint of conflict, just a rediscovering-of-life-through-the-eyes-of-another that might well seem hackneyed if Liz weren't such a disarmingly grounded storyteller.

Meanwhile, in a series of unhurried flashbacks, Liz recalls her pregnancy, offers details about the trip to Rome, and relates other key childhood memories: the time she discovered a dead body along the railroad tracks, her teenage predilection for sneaking into strangers' unlocked homes. Some of these have a set-piece feeling to them; they add texture to the book, but occasionally come off as slightly forced.

By the time Liz sets off for Vienna, having been alerted to the whereabouts of Jeremy's father by a police inspector who tracked her down on the Internet for reasons of his own, she is well on her way to reinvention. Jeremy, in the few months Liz gets to spend with him, stirs many things in her: she has gained a son only to lose him again, but the experience brings her fully into herself for the first time ever.

Things grow gradually weirder as ''Eleanor Rigby" goes on: Jeremy has the ability to sing songs backward, and soon Liz can do it too; a piece of a meteor lands in front of Liz's condo and she begins sleeping with it under her pillow; Jeremy's apocalyptic visions of forsaken farmers begin to mean more to Liz than perhaps they should -- and more than they will to readers, which is unfortunate, since much of the book's symbolism hinges on them.

But Coupland weaves it all together with a light touch, and his narrator's spirit never falters. When Liz finds herself surfacing on the other side of tragedy, in a position to attain the happiness that has always eluded her, it is impossible not to cheer her on. ''Eleanor Rigby" is earnest and warm-hearted, a pleasant landscape dotted with small deposits of profundity. Even as her struggles grow from small and solitary to almost absurdly oversize, Liz's voice remains wonderfully, wittily human.

Adam Mansbach's new novel, ''Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay," will be published next month.