The Gum Thief (Hardcover)

Like an undergraduate essay, the entirety of The Gum Thief is summed up in its opening paragraph:

“A few years ago, it dawned on me that 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. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margaret, the cast members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.”

That is the whole novel: disjointed sentences, a creeping sense of epiphany, runs of pop-culture references, desperation for escape, idiosyncratic diction, and the universalising of every human impulse. If these things don’t appeal to you, you will not enjoy reading this novel.
I do believe that these themes and stylistic tricks have something to them. Douglas Coupland is a grand practitioner of all of them (to some degree all of his fiction is in that paragraph), and I have long admired his ability to chronicle our times through our detritus. The Gum Thief is the Vancouver author’s eleventh work of fiction and he is as good as he ever was at going through our garbage-cultural and otherwise-in order to show us that no matter how utilitarian or unremarkable the object of our focus is, it can still shed light on our civilisation.
Take Staples, for instance. The office supply store is one of the central locations of The Gum Thief. Though characterless, ugly, and easily overlooked, this is the place where the two major characters meet; they are employees there. Fortysomething Roger is divorced and an alcoholic. The action starts when overweight Bethany-who, at twenty-four, is still in her adolescent goth phase-comes across his journal in the Staples staff room and starts reading. She finds in it her coworker’s ruminations (all of which read just like the paragraph quoted above), but also a character sketch of her that Roger has written from her point of view. She responds, suggesting that they write back and forth to one another in the journal, but without changing the way they treat each other around the store.
Initially, novel is made up mostly of the correspondence between Bethany and Roger, but then it expands to include various peripheral characters: another Staples employee, a creative writing professor, Roger’s ex-wife, and DeeDee, Bethany’s mother, who knows Roger from high school and who becomes more important as the novel continues. There is not much plot to speak of; mainly the novel relies on the confessions of its characters, and the extent to which they relate to, and share with, one another. Coupland wisely avoids hints of romance between the central characters, creating tension instead out of various aspects of their lives, the petty store politics of Staples, mother-daughter squabbles, references to popular culture, and random observations.
What is remarkable about all of the letters is how ephemeral the feelings and thoughts they contain seem. The emotions expressed are entertaining but fleeting, and each of the characters seems drawn back to the same point of ennui. Just when this begins to look boring, however, Coupland starts dealing out tragedies. Roger has not just broken up with his wife; he did it in the wake of her bout with cancer, and after he lost his best friends in a car crash. Bethany is not just an ageing goth; she has in her relatively short life suffered through an almost endless parade of death. There is true horror in the lives of these letter-writers, and good reasons for the coping strategies they employ: black lipstick for Bethany, writerly ambitions for the patently untalented Roger.
Roger has been writing a novel titled Glove Pond. It pops up at significant points between the correspondence. A terrible rip-off of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it tells the story of an old English literature academic (Steve) and his wife (Gloria) who drink heavily and try to be “wit machines.” When another couple-a hotshot young novelist (Kyle) and surgeon (Brittany)-come over for dinner, the four characters find themselves clashing and competing with one another. The connections between the The Gum Thief and Glove Pond are hilariously obvious, but they do lend a literary touch to a work that is otherwise devoid of subtext. At one point in Glove Pond, we learn that The Gum Thief’s central narrative is being reversed: Kyle is writing a novel about a man who works at Staples-a man uncannily similar to Roger.
If this sounds like a postmodern trick, that’s probably because it is, but since everything in The Gum Thief is so plainly expressed, there is no suggestion of deep, literary meaning buried in it. One of Coupland’s chief accomplishments here is that he manages to give us a good read-even moving in some parts-out of nothing but declarative statements. His characters are misfits unequipped to express themselves with any originality or stylistic verve. They simply do not have the words or the know-how; they are lazy; they are depressed; and they fail to grasp or articulate certain emotions because they have only clichéd, shallow, or impersonal assertions as points of reference: lyrics, Hallmark cards, corporate double-speak. Frankly, I am amazed that the book works as well at it does.
But this isn’t to say that the book works completely. The epistolary conceit starts to fail towards the end of the novel, when it stops making sense (why would characters in the same room continue writing to one another?), and there are several instances of attempts at cleverness that fall flat. Perhaps the largest failing of The Gum Thief, though, is that its characters sound almost exactly the same. The crisply paged edition that I read had several sheets that stuck together and I often found myself accidentally turning two pages at once, reading a different character’s letter without realising it until I got to the signature.
“Too clever” and “similar voices” are common criticisms of Coupland’s work, and so I suspect that his fans have already made their peace with these issues. Ultimately, The Gum Thief fits perfectly into the author’s oeuvre; it is neither exceptionally bad (like Eleanor Rigby) nor exceptionally good (like JPod) and offers all of Coupland’s hallmarks in decent measure. And like all of his middle-of-the-road books, and like the titular gum, this novel provides a rush of flavour that doesn’t linger too long after the final page.
Matthew Fox (Books in Canada)

Starred Review. Two misfits find common ground and a unique, surreal friendship via unspoken words in Coupland's latest (after JPod), a fine return to form. In the two years since his wife's (nonfatal) cancer was diagnosed, Roger Thorpe has devolved into a dejected, hard-drinking, divorced father and the oldest employee by a fair margin at Staples. A frustrated novelist to boot, Roger considers himself lost, continually haunted by dreams of missed opportunities and a long ago car accident that claimed four friends. His younger, disgruntled goth co-worker, Bethany Twain, one day discovers Roger's diary—filled with mock re-imaginings of her thoughts and feelings—in the break room. She lays down a supreme challenge for them both to write diary entries to each other, but neither is allowed to acknowledge the other around the store. Through exchanged hopes and dreams, customer stories, world views and cautionary revelations (time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties), the pair become intimately acquainted before things unravel for both. Running parallel to the epistolary narrative are chapters from Roger's novel, Glove Pond, which begins having much in common with the larger narrative it's enclosed in. Coupland shines, the story is humorous, frenetic, focused and curiously affecting. (Oct.)
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