Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland.

I've read this book around fifty bajillion times, so forgive me if this is a little less... objective... than I tend to be about most of my selections.

I love this book. I don't care that it's the sort of ninties hopefully-sappy-yet-cynical that defines most angst literature/the gen-x mentality. I love it. I am unashamed to enjoy it, though I'm the first to admit that plot is kinda 'eh' and the end seems cheap.

It's about a woman named Liz Dunn... and as the title suggests, she is lonely. Isn't everyone? But that's besides the point. She describes her life through a series of current moments and much reflection. Liz's life is both lonely and filled with exceptional moments. The novel begins in the 'present' (which is terribly outdated now) when Liz finds a piece of meteorite and flashes back to when her son, Jeremy, first came into her life.

Jeremy is not a normal kid. He's 20, he's dying of multiple sclerosis and due to the disease's penchant to fry the nerves and misdirect electrical impulses in the brain and his history with his foster families (plural), when his sudden entrance into Liz's life is like an explosion. She has to reconnect with every aspect of her life as Jeremy serves as just enough of a catalyst to destroy the friction that ordinarily buffers her from interacting with her home, her co-workers and even her family. She tells the story of how she returned from a completely uncharacteristic trip taken to Rome pregnant with no memory of how such a thing could occur--Liz Dunn was fat as a child, and remains fat as an adult, with curly red hair.... this makes it plain to anyone who lives with any conception of the world that it's strange that this happened to her.

She has her son, he's adopted and years and years later, has tracked her down. His foster history has led him to feel that without his mom in his life, he's a write off. He has her information down as his emergency contact, a fact Liz is completely unaware of until one day when he ODs on "some lame party drugs" while attending a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Liz has a crash course in parenting and, cheesy as it sounds, in facing the reality of what day to day connection is like. It's pretty average, but the slight strange (and Canadian?) way they look at the world makes it stand out.

Jeremy's visions are probably my favorite part of the entire book. He gets these sudden impulses, sudden visions--everything with him is sudden. I guess when you're dying it's all that way, isn't it? I'll paraphrase my favorite:
Two lovers pass each other on the street. They had an ugly break-up. Their punishment is that every time they see each other, they rust a little, like robots. At the end they rust frozen in front of each other, forever.

Jeremy also has a series of recurring visions that serve to parallel both his life and Liz's problematic loneliness. They're visions of farmers and their wives, who've given up on the world, who believe that it is time for the end. They've destroyed their winter stores, they've accepted the end... only, a woman's voice tells them that this is not their path. They have made their decision and chosen wrong. The world isn't emptiness that's filled by relying on the end of destiny to create a point. You have to decide while you're alive what you fight for and if you want God to be a presence in your every day life.

The story ends after Jeremy's death, with Liz going to meet Jeremy's father and while doing so, shuts down the odd airport and ends up being imprisoned. You know, the usual.

Turns out the meteor isn't really a meteor... it's a chunk of a satellite. How much stuff can happen to this one woman, honestly? But the end gets a little Lifetime in that she falls in love with Jeremy's father and you can kinda guess how it goes from there. It seems like I left nothing to the imagination, but there's far too much going on for me to have covered it all... yet the book never feels overwhelming or overinvolved.

So, while this isn't the best book I've ever read, it has a place firmly in my heart.