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The Gum Thief

Douglas Coupland

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May 20, 2009 Lynne rated it liked it

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland is an epistolary novel (I must be on a role with those!) that centers around Bethany and Roger, two employees of a Staples superstore. Roger is a middle-aged man who made a sudden career change for a variety of reasons (I won’t spoil them for you), and Bethany is a perfect foil for him: An overweight goth who hides behind layers and layers of white pancake make-up. Roger keeps a diary at work detailing his monotonous existence, and, after Bethany surreptitiously The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland is an epistolary novel (I must be on a role with those!) that centers around Bethany and Roger, two employees of a Staples superstore. Roger is a middle-aged man who made a sudden career change for a variety of reasons (I won’t spoil them for you), and Bethany is a perfect foil for him: An overweight goth who hides behind layers and layers of white pancake make-up. Roger keeps a diary at work detailing his monotonous existence, and, after Bethany surreptitiously reads it one day, she begins to correspond with him in it; this, along with later FedEx’d letters and email, is their only communication.

Coupland has always been talented at conveying the post-modern banality with which we are all confronted on a daily basis (see Generation X and Microserfs), and this novel is no exception. From the first sentence of the book, “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” (1), we are thrust into a typical Coupland world of neurotic but lovable characters who, while being extremely dissatisfied with their mundane existences, manage to transcend them through their correspondence with each other. Ok, so that makes this sound like a sappy love story, but if you know Coupland then you know that this is anything but.

Just to add another layer, the story gets meta; it turns out that Roger is writing his first novel, Glove Pond, and its chapters invade intersperse the diary entries in the duo’s correspondence. I always love me some po-mo! Glove Pond is very Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf though one of the characters in it compares their lives to a John Cheever novel gone horribly awry. This Cheever meets Clerks is actually an apt description of the novel as a whole because the story within the story contains so many elements from the story of Roger and Bethany that it is difficult to know which one is meant to be “truth.” It very much reminds me of M.C. Eshcer’s drawing “Drawing Hands” (http://www.worldofescher.com/gallery/...) in the way that the reader is kept off-balance in trying to figure out where the fiction within the fiction begins and ends.

With our society’s elevation of big-box stores and consumer culture, is there a better modern version of one of Dante’s circles of hell? Answer: No. It’s also interesting that Coupland stages his semi-surreal opus in what, on the surface, appears to be a wholly realistic place to which all of us can relate: An office supply superstore. However, if you think about it, these places are actually as surreal as you can get. I mean, think about it: An entire aisle dedicated to blue ball-point pens? An entire aisle dedicated to hole punches? Kafka would have loved to place his characters here. Is there any place that more accurately captures the inhumanity and ennui of our modern-day lifestyle? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Despite supposedly being the voice of my generation and the awesomeness of naming a book after a song by The Smiths, Coupland has always been a bit hit or miss with me. This is not a pleasant novel by any standard; indeed, Coupland seems to be channeling Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky in his portrait of human hopelessness and failure. However, this just makes the book more of a meaty (actually, since I’m a vegetarian, I’ll say “tofuy”) meal because I love the moral failings of the Russian protagonists! Thanks to the pathos that permeates this novel, particularly in the characters within Glove Pond, this satire/character study is a hit.

P.S. I would actually give it 3 1/2 stars.
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