Liz Dunn, the protagonist (and we’ll use that term loosely here) of Eleanor Rigby, is a fortysomething spinster, a misanthropic loner since her earliest years, who pretty much hates everything and everyone, but not nearly as much as she hates herself. One night in 1997, on the eve of her wisdom tooth extraction, Liz pauses in the video store parking lot - she’s stocking up on sad videos to pass the time during her week-long, post-surgical convalescence - to notice the fuzzy presence of comet Hale-Bopp in the sky over Vancouver. Liz almost, but not quite, has some sort of epiphany as she contemplates the comet, then goes home, only to have her life shaken up by the reappearance of a 20-year-old son whom she gave up for adoption at birth.

Jeremy, the prodigal son, is a drug-using hipster, but he’s not as much of a loser as he at first appears. He only takes drugs (the illegal kind) to escape both the symptoms of his rapidly progressing multiple sclerosis and the numbing effects of the drugs (the prescription kind) meant to control those symptoms. Jeremy seems weird, but he’s really a visionary who sees, when he’s off his medication, visions of farmers listening to booming voices from the heavens. Liz, who has never cared much for people, finds herself becoming all maternal over Jeremy, and her world will never be the same.

Coupland’s work is always riddled with the type of teenage mysticism that Jeremy brings to Liz’s life, and the most disappointing moment in the course of reading one of Coupland’s novels comes when you realize that he is dead serious about all of it. His characters seem, for the first hundred or so pages of each book, like vaguely interesting flakes and fruitcakes, but then, about midway along the plot trajectory, it becomes clear that we’re not supposed to be amused by their eccentricities; we are, indeed, supposed to be inspired by them. Coupland actually thinks he’s teaching us something. So even though Jeremy’s stoic, Christlike suffering and wacky visions might seem delusional and incoherent, they’re actually, Coupland would have us believe, significant and revelatory. Even if the reader can’t make heads nor tails of his visions, at least Liz can, and by novel’s end (all right, I guess this is a bit of a spoiler) she’s Eleanor Rigby no longer.

All that aside, the book is a stomach-turning collection of characters that have been cut from a manual of stereotypes and then had their fatal flaws amplified to the point that they’ll induce either nausea or hysterical (although unintended) laughter. Liz’s sister is a go-get-’em type-A personality who thinks shopping and beauty treatments will solve anything, hence her devotion to her new, surgically enhanced breasts. Liz’s brother is a cynical, perpetual adolescent, and his twin sons are the only two ADHD sufferers on the planet who have not yet been medicated. Liz’s mother is a repressed neurotic who is intent on spackling over the fissures in her family. Liz’s co-worker, Donna, is an air-headed office Jezebel straight out of “Ally McBeal.” Jeremy is a quietly besieged saint, a poor kid who suffered through a series of emotionally, physically and sexually abusive foster families, only to be stricken by a fatal and debilitating disease.

Liz herself is the grim icing on the cake. Her self-loathing is so extreme - the main aim of her first-person narration is to remind the reader again and again of how fat, ugly and miserable she is - that it drowns out her loathing of everyone else she ever meets.