Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I finished Eleanor Rigby yesterday. It was a most pleasing read. The back of it has a quote from some guy claiming that Coupland’s last four novels have redefined fiction or something, but that includes “Miss Wyoming” which is one of my least favourite Coupland books, so I’m not sure how much I agree with that opinion. The last three books have been damn good though. Eleanor Rigby especially is a departure in a lot of ways, for Coupland, because the narrative style is quite obviously different from his previous books, the attitudes of the protaganist being more obvious and yet less forced than his previous works.

He’s still into his non-linear method of story telling and this book takes place in at least three different time periods. It gets a bit meta towards the end when the protaganist starts going on about how people just view narrators in books as looking like generic everymen or some kind of extension of themselves, and because Coupland’s doing that to try and emphasise that in this case, it’s important that the protaganist i s fat it starts to get a bit heavy-handed. Coupland has spoken about how he deliberately omits the small details occasionally so that people will fill them in from their own life and memories and thus connect with the work better, but when stripped of that technique he seems a little lost as to how to proceed.

That’s a minor niggle though. The narrative tangents and substories of extreme profundity and irreverence are still present, which makes it worth reading. I’m not sure I’d say it’s my favourite Coupland book, but it’s in the better half. This may be the first time he’s done an all-female-protaganist book, and being make i have some difficulties connecting well to female characters, not huge difficulty, just not as much ease as with male ones I guess.

Looking back at when I finished Hey! Nostradamus 2 years ago, I see that one of my criticisms was that the narrative seemed inspecific to each character. He’s got over that one quite well. Coupland has had a new novel out in august/september 2001, 2003, 3004 and he’s about to have jPod in 2006. He’s really churning them out, and a great thing about only having just read this one is that the wait until the next is much shorter than it should’ve been.

Having finished this book, I went in search of a new one. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy, except maybe a copy of the Dragon and the George, the novel upon which childhood-favourite movie the Flight of Dragons was based. But me, read fantasy? I’m not sure even the FoD connection can keep me interested. Though, I may yet have to give it a shot. I finally settled upon borrowing Lolita off Nikki, since I’ve never read it and I feel there isn’t enough Russian literature in my diet. I wonder if it’s an odd book to read on the tube. I know it’s Literature (capital L) but everyone knows what it’s about and it’s linked by the very lexicon to one of societies most unacceptable themes. Frankly after reading Haunted I’m not so sure I’ll be remotely disturbed by any of the content, but I can see how the reactionary tube-riding public might judge me. Because everyone on the tube is a detestable moron. I’ll let you know if it’s any good or not, anyway, and if I get any strange looks.