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.
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