All The Lonely People

Courtesy Random House Canada

Anonymity appears to interest Douglas Coupland, although in the largely anonymous landscape of Canadian fiction, he is a star. He does not act like one, nor look like one. At 43, in a blue button-down shirt, with a greying goatee and gentle, unfocused eyes, he looks like any middle-aged man in a Toronto hotel restaurant. A teacher. A casual lawyer. Certainly not one of Canada’s best selling authors, and more than a decade ago, the reluctant face of an entire epoch with his breakthrough debut novel Generation X.

Anonymity – or its offspring, loneliness – is Liz Dunn’s problem. Liz is the heavy, rapidly aging heroine of Coupland’s ninth novel, Eleanor Rigby, a name that arises only once in the book’s pages (it is half of Liz’s chosen e-mail address), but the grim pop of the Beatles song lends the comedy its dark spirit.

“I have a friend in San Francisco named Liz Dunn,” says Coupland, sipping decaf English breakfast tea to soothe a throat raw from a book tour (he just took cortisone spray for his voice but he still does an excellent, scratchy impression of Brenda Vaccarro in her TV ad phase: “Tampons,” he says, cracking up). “I’m a two finger typist and I’m terrible and I’m lazy so all the characters in my book start out their lives as ‘Ed’ or ‘Liz.’ Literally, it’s three little clicks and at the end you find-and-replace and turn them into Rumplestiltskin if you want to. Liz started out like that and it just stuck.”

The real Liz Dunn was a little nervous when she learned that her namesake is, as Coupland describes her, not only “the loneliest woman on the planet” but also so homely that she claims to have no understanding of beauty. She lives in a non-descript Vancouver condo that seems, like her grinding life, designed to deflect all attention (“There was nothing in it that moved or denoted time’s passage – no plants or clocks…”), which is okay because she has no friends. It takes the sudden appearance of a long lost son for Liz to break out of her isolation and connect with something bigger residing out there in the universe. The real Liz, Coupland points out, is petite and cute, and presumably, popular.

“You know how, to make a glass of orange juice you have to squeeze eight oranges to make a glass? To make one character you have to squeeze about eight people to get the right concentration and density. But people get so weird about it,” says Coupland with a sigh. “If there’s a quirk or a mannerism or something I’m borrowing from a friend, I always get verbal clearance now.”

But Liz isn’t a loser by any standard. She does what Coupland’s characters, his Microserfs and teen dwellers of Shampoo Planet, tend to do best: calmly elucidate the superficial madness of their times, with wit and irony. His books are also meditations on sadness, a fact more poignant when he says that his books are always about him. “In my twenties, I didn’t know who I was. I kept thinking: My head feels awful. I feel psychotic. Am I getting enough magnesium? And then I thought, it might just be loneliness.” Loneliness, Coupland points out, must be distinguished from that more modern concern, depression.

“The difference is that for depression you can take a pill,” he says. “I remember going to bookstores when I was lonely, trying to find something about loneliness, but there were only Walden Pond-type reflections on solitude and nature. They were kind of patronizing, like get off your tuft and do something. My twenties were the ’80s for me, and Prozac hadn’t happened yet…” His voice drifts off as someone pulls up a chair at a table near by. “I can’t focus sound,” he says. “You guys might cancel each other out.” He waits, decides he can hear all right and continues: “In ’96, I had a depressive episode and I went to a doctor who gave me a drug. I took it and two hours later I really wanted to kill myself. It wore off four hours later, but ever since, when people talk about suicide, I know what they mean. Terrifying. It scared me away from pharmaceuticals. That’s a door I just can’t open.” For loneliness, the cure is more elusive. “Oh, a pet. A relationship,” says Coupland. “But I did this awful thing, I’ll never forgive myself for it. As soon as I became unlonely, I stopped calling on the people who had helped me. ”

Photo by David John Weir

It is this openness, and the kind of tangential storytelling – in the middle of a monologue about loneliness, he tells a mini-epic about Terry Fox’s sock, relating to a book on Fox he has written, which is due in stores this April – that might explain why Coupland sometimes comes across in the press as a little bit of an oddball. His thoughts appear to run this way and that, befitting a man who needs several media with which to express himself: non-fiction, photography, sculpture, live theatre. Still, he is adamant that he maintains some relation to the slackers he brought to light in Generation X. “If I really wanted to, I could probably do twice as much,” he says. “When you’re writing a book, it’s a trance state you’re in for a year or two. There is always just a part of you working, but the other part of you could be hammering, welding, doing whatever. I’m lazy. It’s not a posture.”

Another of his skills is furniture designing, though several articles mention that Coupland doesn’t own any of his work. He looks appalled to come face to face with this fact again. “Oh my God. I don’t know where that comes from. It’s like Richard Gere and the gerbil,” he says, pretending to bury his face in a stack of throw cushions. “I love stuff. I like making it, collecting it, swapping it. A beautiful object is a crystallization of a beautiful idea. We should be making more stuff.”

Coupland lives in a modernist West-Vancouver home, blocks from where he grew up and his parents still reside. The busy house – “There’s always something going on in and around it” – is a strong contrast to Liz’s unaltered showroom condo. “I believe that a person’s living room is the closest metaphor you have of their soul. You know how you think you know someone and then you see their place, and you realize you don’t know them at all? It’s like, who are you? Unassailably bleak environment.”

He pauses, as if thinking back to the gerbil-furniture issue. “I’m told that there’s also a web rumour that I collect meteorites.”

Liz, in fact, encounters a meteorite, its slow trajectory towards the planet a metaphor for her long transition into un-loneliness. “I know, I know, I shouldn’t have put that in. People will think I really do have a thing for meteorites,” laughs Coupland. “I wonder if it became some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because I kept hearing it.”

Eleanor Rigby is less structurally complex than 2003’s Hey, Nostradamus! – a loose rethinking of Columbine told from several perspectives that became his most critically acclaimed book – and less lauded (reviews have been mixed). But Coupland claims he doesn’t read his press. “It could be paralyzing. And with Google, you can find anything: Douglas Coupland and Asshole. There it is. Douglas Coupland and Great Guy. I don’t know what my image is, and I don’t want to know. It’s healthier that way.”

A former student at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, Coupland says he “entered words through Jenny Holzer and Andy Warhol.” He talks about writing in visual, nearly sculptural terms. “I would love to read a book pasted onto boards like in China, moving down the row. I like the physicality of a book. I like paper. I like ink. I like the process.”

But book reverence, at least for his own work, isn’t forever. When he finishes this tour of Canada and the United States, he will throw his ritualistic “book’s over” party and light Eleanor Rigby aflame. “After all the press is done, you have some friends over, you take one of your books and set fire to it. I do it every time,” he says. “You have to because otherwise, when is the book over? Is it when it comes out in paperback? Is it the Norwegian paperback? Out of print? At what point does a book end? You burn it, and then you wake up the next morning and you go on to other things.”

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.