Book Review: “The Gum Thief” by Douglas Coupland

***SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU INTEND TO READ THE BOOK***

I have been a fan of Douglas Coupland’s books for a long time. The first one I read was “Girlfriend in a Coma”. In that book, I learned about and began to love the Couplandisms that define his novels.

Then there was a period of 5 or so years where I read none of his books. Having read two in the last 6 months, I am left to wonder if the quality of his writing has taken a turn for the worse or whether I’ve simply grown out of a phase. I will probably need to re-read “Girlfriend in a Coma” to figure this out.

The main weakness evident in The Gum Thief is that all of the characters seem to be too much like the author himself. Coupland’s insights about the modern age are indeed witty and interesting, but they seem to surface on the lips of all his characters.

In The Gum Thief, this could be passed off as a weakness of the Roger, the narrator and amateur writer we later find out has written the book. But if you’ve read more of Coupland’s work you’ll see that those similarities originate with the author who is pulling the strings of the amateur writer who narrates much of the book.

Five minutes later: after reading a review of “The Gum Thief” in the NYT. I am pleased to see that reviewer detected the same thing:

“While ‘The Gum Thief’ aims for a polyphonic effect, its characters often sound disconcertingly similar. The prose and arch banter of ‘Glove Pond’ are distinct, but outside it the characters’ voices and preoccupations tend to blur. ‘I woke up every morning with my stomach clenching. Why? Because I felt like a useless member of society, and I could feel the ghosts of the people who built the Brady Bunch suburb surrounding me.’ That’s Bethany’s mother, DeeDee, writing, but her tone of hip, cosmic weariness… could belong to virtually anyone in these pages.”

As always,  there are a number of quotable sections in the book:

Upon first meeting the woman who would become his wife (and later ex wife) Roger says:

“She was the same age as me, but without the mileage. She looked like Jane, from the Dick and Jane books, grown up, apple-cheeked, healthy and itching to correct my grammar.”

Bethany describing her family:

“Imagine a group of people even more annoying than mimes, with the added bonus of loud, grating speech and no sense of manners or propriety. That would be us.”

There are some musings about body-snatcher movies and the realities of DNA on pages 230-232 that are worth reading but are too lengthy to quote.

Structure

This is a book within a book… within a book. It is revealed on the final pages that the only purely flesh and blood character in the book is Roger, the main narrative voice of the story. But even then we’re not told how much he is fictionalizing himself within his own novel.

We’re led to believe we’re reading a series of letters written between Roger, his co-worker, her mother, Roger’s ex-wife, and a few other characters. In reality, the whole thing is a fictional narrative  written by one person (Roger), who is imagining what all the others might say. The only person who is not speaking from within the fictional narrative is Roger’s writing instructor, for whose class Roger has produced the fictional exchange you’ve just read.

Confused? Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t seem that confusing when you’re reading the book and to be honest I wasn’t very impressed with it while I was reading. But now, thinking about it and trying to articulate the intricacies of the plot, I’m finding great value in its ingenuity.

Two More Layers

Within the story in which Roger has cast himself, he is writing a novel that his other fictional characters are reading; within this novel, two other authors exist who are also writing novels, both of whom are mining the details of their lives for fictional material. So Roger is mining his own life for fiction while Roger’s fictional characters are mining Roger’s fictional life for their own fiction.

Again, this seems more confusing now than it did when I was reading.

Conclusion

“The Gum Thief” is an interesting tale, but in the end not compelling enough for me to recommend that you read the book yourself. The fascinating parts of the book are realized after having finished it, in discovering that things were not as they appeared to be. After this is revealed, the words, actions, and longings of the characters in the book take on greater significance.

This started out as a very poor review, but I now think the book a little bit brilliant. And that’s me saying that, not the fictional narrator from whose perspective I wrote the beginning of the review.

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