The Gum Thief, By Douglas Coupland

In his 2006 novel Jpod Douglas Coupland gleefully cuts-and-pastes from contemporary culture. The narrative welcomes interjections from a crowd of textual flotsam: gamers’ chats, imaginary ebay ads, Chinese translations of words like ‘pornography,’ and 20 straight pages of pi. The characters, brilliant computer game programmers with woefully low Emotional Quotients, are made for the information-rich, spiritually impoverished milieu that he describes. In The Gum Thief Coupland turns his attentions to those who haven’t adapted so well.

Middle-aged Roger and goth-girl Bethany work dead-end jobs at Staples, an office supply superstore. They barely interact with each other until Bethany picks up Roger’s journal and reads an entry he’s written from her perspective. Though “creeped out,” Bethany empathises with Roger’s melancholy musings enough to write back, hoping to alleviate her boredom.

The story develops as a series of journal entries, letters and emails written by Roger and characters almost as gloomy – his bitter ex-wife Joan, Bethany’s distant mum Dee Dee and so on. Unlike the unfeeling nerds in Jpod, these more human characters have been raised emotional sitting ducks; if “you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.” Bethany and Roger search hard for solace after suffering the deaths of friends and family members, after cancers grow and marriages decay. To begin with, Roger doubts he even deserves his little remaining optimism: “Souls ought to have the legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds.”

Unsurprisingly, The Gum Thief lacks the spontaneity and playfulness of other Coupland novels. It does, however, feature characteristic moments of singular description. On the formation of the asteroid belt, Bethany says, a planet and its moon got “too closely entangled in each other’s orbits and they collided and shattered. How romantic, in a Japanese manga kind of way”. At one point Roger writes about how little culture and technology poor Poe had to draw on for metaphors back in 1849. In the best phrases of The Gum Thief, Coupland really rubs this in.

That said, the author sacrifices much of his creative firepower in the attempt to write realistically as someone who isn’t really a writer. With Bethany’s encouragement, Roger embarks on the novel he’s long planned to write, ‘Glove Pond,’ chapters of which are strewn through The Gum Thief. Roger’s novel is terrible. The catty, alcoholic characters are mere sketches and the imagery often, well, sucks. Ultimately, Roger finds catharsis in the idea that his creations weren’t always caricatures but were reduced, like him, to semi-humans by their personal tragedies. While it’s a nice sentiment, in getting there Coupland shows just how difficult it is to sustain bad but interesting writing, however realistic Roger’s voice may be.

As Roger explores his emotions through his novel, it gradually becomes hijacked by events in his and Bethany’s lives. A creative writing teacher criticizes Roger for failing to lose his own voice in his writing, an argument that is meant ironically but, applied to The Gum Thief, rings true. Coupland struggles to create distinct voices for his speakers, a difficulty exacerbated by the novel’s reliance on written messages, rather than dialogue and action. The characters just aren’t vital and substantial enough to earn our sympathy, a must for a story so focused on the crippling potential of grief.