Post-X Douglas Coupland’s moment passes BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Eleanor Rigby By Douglas Coupland. Bloomsbury, 249 pages, $22.95

In his first novel, 1991’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland gave name to the crop of humans born in North America between the early ’60s and the mid ’70s. In terse, self-conscious prose, he defined this disaffected demographic, a generation of overeducated and underemployed ironists. Generation X revolves around a discrete set — either you are Gen X or you’re not. In his tenth novel, Eleanor Rigby, Coupland expands his set to include everyone on the planet. True to its title, the novel focuses on loneliness, and loneliness knows no generational bounds.

Fat, single, and 43 years old, Liz Dunn lives in a sterile Vancouver condo and works a prosy job. She’s also sarcastic, self-aware, and matter-of-fact, and she resists self-pity. "Merely being around other humans doesn’t help me — loneliness in a crowd is the most pathetic variant. On the other hand, at least in a crowd you have a chance, however slim, of meeting that cosmic person whose presence will still your fevered lonely brain. Alone in your condo, your chances are zip."

The entire book is told in this quick, confessional, conversational first person that feels part chat and part journal. There’s the occasional direct address to the reader: "I mean, what’s your own nature/nurture crap-shoot? You’re here. You’re reading these words. Is this a coincidence? Maybe you think fate is only for others. Maybe you’re ashamed to be reading about loneliness — maybe someone will catch you and then they’ll know your secret stain." Addressing the reader like this is its own crap shoot: it can engage, but it can also alienate. Coupland makes it work. His plot, on the other hand, becomes so un-universal that it teeters toward implausible. As far-fetched as portions of Generation X were, the book constructed a plausible self-contained universe. Eleanor Rigby doesn’t.

Liz’s solitude is interrupted by occasional visits from her brother and his bratty kids, her "glamorous sister the milk robot with her Hindenburg bosom," her medicated mom, and a few meddling co-workers. That is, until 1997, when a 20-year-old man gets admitted to the hospital with her name on his MedicAlert bracelet. Jeremy Buck turns out to be the son she had when she was 16, the result of a night in Rome on a school trip that she was too drunk to remember. (This trip is one of three time threads that Coupland weaves throughout the book, along with the present day and the time of Jeremy’s return.) Jeremy, who has bumped around in foster care for most of his life, is clever and self-depreciating, just like mom, and he and Liz hit it off like old pals. Liz responds to being thrust into a maternal role (and thrust out of solitude) with grace, humor, and natural instinct; the pleasure she takes in waking up to the smell of the eggs Jeremy cooks is palpable. She also has to take on the role of caretaker. Jeremy has multiple sclerosis, and on top of that he has visions. He gets "hijacked by pictures" of "things we see when we’re near the end of times." The Jeremy thread — even the Apocalyptic visions of bones dangling from rope in the sky — as well as everything that takes place in Rome feels legit, unpredictable yet inevitable.

What takes place in 2004, however, exhausts credibility. A meteorite falls at Liz’s feet, she gets summoned to Austria to aid in a police investigation of a man who’s been waging odd assaults on women (a man who might have been at a certain Roman nightclub when Liz was 16), and on her way, she provokes an international incident at the airport in Frankfurt. It’s here that you might feel less willing to suspend disbelief.

Liz and all the other lonely people in Eleanor Rigby notwithstanding, Coupland projects a cosmic optimism. Things might be messy and hard, but everything falls into place, he seems to say with the book’s tidy, positive ending. Can we fault him for being too hopeful? Well, yes. If you’re of the post-Gen-X crowd, if you came of age closer to the fall of the twin towers than the fall of the Berlin Wall, then you might feel that this optimism doesn’t quite belong in the present tense. Generation X has moved on, but Coupland is still where he was when he named it.

Douglas Coupland reads from Eleanor Rigby this Monday, January 24, at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Newtonville Books reading series at the Attic Bar, 107R Union Street in Newton. Admission is free; call (617) 244-6619.