4-fucking AM and albeit my tired bones, sleep is nowhere in sight.
I’ve just finished reading Coupland’s latest offering The Gum Thief a couple of weeks ago and while it is classic Coupland to say the least, there was something inherently absent about it; that something that was present in his older phenomenal works Microserfs and Generation X; that something which made me want to devour the book in one sitting. Sure, there were the standard pop-culture references, the casual, yet deliciously snide vernacular, and the loopy, neurotic characters one can’t help but to relate to and love, but there is a missing element which does not allow myself to describe this — like how I felt towards his other books — as amazing.
Set in an epistolary fashion, the book centers its spotlight on 2 colleagues working in a Staples Inc., one a cynical and embittered 40-something (Roger) plodding through life while drinking himself into oblivion and the other a young Goth girl (Bethany) who stumbles upon his diary one day and starts an unusual correspondence with him through the pages, while never acknowledging each other’s existence in real life. All of this is interspersed with chapters from Roger’s abysmal novel-in-progress Glove Pond, a John Cheever-era novel trainwreck which for some reason I found myself enjoying immensely, much more than the primary book, which is rather ironic if I may say so myself. Perhaps there were parts in which I found the both of them too whiny, and perhaps I do wish that Coupland worked more on the ending (especially the ending!), but all in all I wouldn’t exactly say the novel sucked, although I admit that I did expect more.
Through the letters Roger and Bethany share, Coupland presents the deadening banality of the contemporary moment, capturing the zeitgeist of people floating free in a society they do not feel themselves a part of — how some of us drive from parking lot to parking lot, trapped in one big-box store after another, waiting in line for The End of the World. Reminiscent of Coupland’s other novels, there is this feeling of pre-apocalyptic anxiety in the lives of Roger and Bethany. And yet, as in Generation X, it is through their shared friendship, and their stories, that Roger and Bethany transcend the meaninglessness of their lives.
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