Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief
New Novel Explores Characters in Aimless Transit
Review of Douglas Coupland's forthcoming novel "The Gum Thief," with analysis of Coupland's output, including Generation X, Miss Wyoming, and JPod.
Douglas Coupland is a man of complete duality. He writes two types of novels, the first involving aimless groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings in giant corporations finding ways to do anything but work, the second involving familial dramas featuring aimless groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings trying to find peace with their parents and their strange new world. Coupland uses both types of books to plays out his ambivalence of the future, at once a strict Luddite, deathly afraid of technology and its ability to obsolesce man, and also entirely entrenched within the modern world, a Wired contributor and technophile. Google and Youtube are frequently invoked in The Gum Thief: at one point, another character laments not being able to escape to Tasmania because they’ll be able to Google his dark past there too.
Both Brilliant and Blundering
Coupland is also by turns brilliant and blundering, able to make both cuttingly astute observations (Generation X), and, alternately, to be plain lousy, with cake-frosting characters spouting cringe-worthy dialogue and having sitcom-level hysterics (Miss Wyoming). Never knowing whether his next book will be a masterpiece or a dud is one of the joys of approaching a Coupland novel.
The Gum Thief
That said, The Gum Thief is neither great nor terrible. Its thesis is stated outright, right away: “everybody past a certain age—regardless of how they look on the outside—pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.” The novel is entirely concerned with change and loss—loss of youth, direction, and the ones we love. Like many of Coupland’s novels, it’s equally hilarious and jet-metal black, its characters desperate to escape their jobs, families, and lives, while irrevocably attached to all three.
Roger and Bethany and Staples
The novel stars two disillusioned, pessimistic misfits working at Staples and conversing to one another via secret lunch-room memos. Roger is a man en manqué, in his forties, long since fallen from the grace of selling ski resort time-shares. He’s divorced and broken, self-described as “the oldest Staples inmate employee by a fair margin.” There’s also Bethany, the spitting image of anomy, a neophyte misanthropist and overweight 24-year-old Goth girl still living at home with Mom. Both characters have led lives rich with death, disappointment, and disaster, but here, in the Staples break room, they find some small rapport, and through it, relief.
Also, Glove Pond
The Gum Thief is also a novel within a novel (hold on to your seats): throughout, Roger is writing his own novel called Glove Pond (because, according to Google, no one’s ever put those words together). Glove Pond is the story of a failed novelist and his harridan wife living near poverty, receiving a dinner visit from a million-selling young author and his brain surgeon wife. Both old and young novelists are writing new books, both of which are about working in an office supply store. It’s a metafictional conceit that plays out well—Coupland clearly enjoys crafting stories within stories, showing that using literature as art is his most accomplished habit.
Fiction, Nonfiction, Metafiction
And it’s certainly his most “literary” work yet: Coupland uses Glove Pond’s characters to stick it to his detractors who see his work as gimmicky fluff (he sees them as anachronistic and farcical, trying unsuccessfully to live in bygone eras). Perhaps most interestingly, Coupland shows how fact interweaves with fiction in the creation of what is essentially truer-than-life “make-believe,” and how writers mine their own lives for their work, regardless of how it affects their relationships. Fact becomes fiction’s fodder, sometimes verbatim. Elements of reality influence Roger constantly as he’s writing Glove Pond; Bethany and her mom DeeDee, his two best readers, are alluded to often, their letters to him referenced in the piecemeal novel he sends back to them.
Unfortunately, it all never really adds up to much more than a fun conceptual exercise. More sass than substance, The Gum Thief is an entertaining, unique entry into the Coupland canon, just touching and inoffensive enough to find a cozy spot next to Eleanor Rigby and Shampoo Planet as forgivably overlookable Coupland, capable but uncompelling.
