If you're dipping into Coupland, this is not the place to start. If you've read a lot of his books and feel like his bizarre writing style is like an old friend, then read it. ( )

Coupland is one of those writers whose style I find utterly abhorrent and at the same time so hilariously accurate that I always end up impressed. What I mean is that this book reads terribly because it must – it is a terribly accurate portrayal of how the protagonists would write. It's only because Coupland somehow, without you even realising it, lets you understand every mind-numbing spirit-crushing moment of the character's lives, that you know you are actually reading a damn fine book. Even the complicated book structure of novels written by characters who are themselves characters, leaving you with multiple concurrent storylines, are reduced to almost infantile simplicity. I felt like I was reading a tabloid most of the time, only to find at the end that I'd actually been reading an accurate and brilliantly observed piece of contemporary literature.

Like all of Coupland's characters who belong to generation X, Roger is perfect. The second main character, Bathany, is twenty years younger. Her character is not quite as believable. I appreciated the interplay of generations but somehow I don't think that Coupland really gets Gen-Y. ( )

I never thought I’d appreciate so much a novel that reminds me of the hellish year I spent working at Staples. I’d just dropped out of college, I had a somewhat older and incredibly controlling loser boyfriend and most of my ambitions around this time seem to have dropped off like the acquaintances of someone bound for the Witness Relocation Program. It wasn’t the best of times for me.

Having read The Gum Thief, I’m only now starting to suspect that it’s never the best of times for anybody, so long as they’re clothed in that red button-down, slaving away at a Staples somewhere.

Roger is a loser. He’s blown it big time, even before coming to work at Staples. While on his lunch breaks, he writes in a notebook, alternating between his own thoughts and pretending to be Bethany, his younger, Goth-obsessed coworker. What Roger really wants is to write Glove Pond, the novel that’s been circulating inside his mind for years, but he satiates his need to write by pretending to be a girl he sees daily but has never spoken to.

The Gum Thief is an epistolary novel, a narrative written completely in the style of personal or interpersonal communications. It joins the ranks of such books as Dracula, Fangland, The Feverhead and The Color Purple.

What starts out as just Roger’s eccentricity becomes more complex as Bethany finds the notebook and writes her own entries. From there, Roger is given the push he needs to begin putting his novel on paper, and Bethany’s mother Dee Dee, a high school classmate of Roger’s, begins writing letters as well. What started as the releasing of one strange man’s pressure valve takes on a life and gravity of its own as other Staples employees and even Roger’s ex wife begin to communicate, though not always in the notebook. There are letters, FedExes and notes slipped through mail slots galore, not to mention communications in the form of emails and manuscript critiques.

Quirky, interesting and definitely worth a read for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty job.

http://alookatabook.blogspot.com/2009... ( )

I had given up much hope for Coupland after the last few books I read of his (though I haven't read in order so it could just the ones I picked out) but this book proved to be worth the buy. It has been the first book in awhile that has made me pause while reading it and sort out how I feel about conversations the characters have. It is a depressing read but littered with numbers of gems (buttering!)that picked me up when I was starting to look to hard at the bottle of pills nearby. ( )

The Gum Thief is the story of two poor shlubs stuck in a typically Coupland scenario, a dead-end job stacking shelves at Staples. Roger is a 40-something divorcee, a frustrated writer whose life has fallen apart and whose only inspiration for writing comes from the staff and customers he meets at work. Bethany is the daughter one of Roger's former schoolmates, a lonely goth girl in her early 20s who becomes fascinated with Roger's writing, particularly his novel Glove Pond, an attempt at recapturing the style of John Cheever, the so-called "Chekhov of the suburbs". Bethany's attention encourages Roger to plough on with his book, proving that all a writer needs to be happy is a reader. She is his muse, yet in a pleasingly platonic sense (the obvious alternative is never pursued, despite the fears of Bethany's mother Dee Dee).

Read the full review at my blog. ( )

I was at chapters with a gift certificate in my hand informing me that if I spent more than $50 in the store, i’d get 40% off my purchases. Well, that’s a good way to get me to pad out my shopping. I bought The Gum Thief because it had a nice cover and I thought i’d give Douglas Coupland another shot. Also, the book was already 30% off. Oh Hells Yes. The Gum Theif was great. I liked it so much more than JPod, the only other book by Coupland that i’ve read. The story revolves, more or less, around two people, a depressed middle-aged man and a goth girl, both working at Staples. The story is told via letters and diary entries passed between the two protagonists, and other characters as the case may be; mixed into this is a novella being written by one of the characters. Unlike JPod, you feel for the characters, they are interesting and illicit your empathy. It’s a very enjoyable read. Another plus with this book is that the actual book, once you take of the dust jacket, is a beautiful pink. It’s an awesome book to carry around. -- http://funkaoshi.com/blog/the-gum-thi... ( )

I'm halfway through The Gum Thief, and so far I think it's my favourite Coupland book.

Still my favourite.

I always feel a sudden sadness after finishing one of Douglas Coupland's books. A sort of empty feeling knowing the end has come.
He's the only author I have read who can realistically depict humanity through writing. Other author's are good, but there is just something about the way he writes it. Every one of his books, especially The Gum Thief is like reading pages out of your own diary. Any one of the characters can be you.

I fell in love with Bethany's character because we are the same age, and I can relate with her struggle with figuring out who she is. I love the way her story develops. It is so hopeful, yet so true to form.

This book was very profound but in an everyday ind of way. It makes you think deeper about regular occurrences and thoughts you have all the time. ( )

The Gum Thief is quite possibly Coupland's best novel to date. It takes place, mainly, within the world of a few Staples employees. It operates on many layers all at once, containing the perspectives of multiple characters, as Coupland often does. However, in The Gum Thief, Coupand also includes another layer consisting of fiction, written by one of the main characters, entangled within the thoughts of a whole host of characters who are pretty hopelessly entrenched in mediocrity and sadness. The result is an interesting dialogue between the fiction and the actual characters, with furthers one's understanding of the deepest thoughts and fears of the protagonist.

It is about what all of Douglas Coupland's books are about at their core, people working far beneath their potential, crippled by past tragedy and pain and being overly self aware. The thing that elevates The Gum Thief, in terms of Coupland's work is that it has a brilliant ending. Most of his books tend to peter out at the end as Coupland tries to force his characters into some sort of epiphany, instead of allowing the story to end in catharsis for the reader. In The Gum Thief, Coupland finally puts epiphany for the reader over epiphany for the characters and, thus, finally succeeds in creating a novel that is as meaningful and well crafted as it is witty and captivating.

A story within a story, this is a book about several individuals, linked through work at a Staples store, who exchange letters and stories. But also in the book is the story of a deeply disfunctional couple, written by one of the main characters - and it is this second, inner story that is the more compelling of the two. Overall the book was ok, but I would think it has strong appeal only for Coupland fans. ( )

I don't think that Douglas Coupland set out to write the worst book ever written, but it looks like he almost made it,. Coupland has been very successful writing about quirky characters trying to get by in a mundane life. This time he picks average people and they are a LOT less interesting. Like Joseph Heller in Something Happened, it is almost impossible to make the mundane actually interesting.

Roger is a drunken, divorced writer working at Staples. He carries on a correspondence with Bethany, a twenty something slacker from a dysfunctional family who also works there. Together they write some of the most excruciating prose you have ever tried to read. Roger's Glove Pond is a trite rehashing of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf without the witty dialogue. Some of the essays on Toast are almost lyrical, but almost all of them are truncated snippets of good ideas never realized. In the end, the best you could hope for is that all of the characters would die. But they don't. ( )

Very hard to put down. You never know what the characters are going to reveal about themselves next or where their itnerconnected relationships will lead them. ( )

I love Douglas Coupland, unfortunately this is his most lackluster book I've read. It was funny at times and the offbeat characters were off the beat in exactly the right way, the story was OK, good premise...but it ran out of steam really fast instead of building up on it's own momentum.

Also, the whole ripping off of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf schtick without any of the hip, culture-savvy characters recognizing Roger's bad plagiarism other then several "Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton movies" comments. Come on. Glove Pond was pretty terrible. The Gum Thief is OK. ( )

While Douglas Coupland never ceases to surprise me with his wit and style, The Gum Thief takes on the epistolary novel in a way that only a literary innovator like Coupland can. The main characters, Roger and Bethany, are separated by a 20-year age gap, both stuck in dead end jobs at Staples, and don't particularly care for eachother when the book begins when their correspondence accidentally begins. But as the novel progresses - in Roger's Diary, letters to and from various characters, and a novel-within-a-novel - they come to find inspiration in eachother, which is perhaps cliche, but also touching. ( )

In Coupland's newest novel, Roger, a middle-aged, middle-class, morose clerk at Staples, and Bethany, a twenty-something lost soul begin to correspond and connect through journal entries, letters, and Roger's in-progress novel. For Coupland fans, these characters are the expected types – tired of the shallow and materialistic world in which they are inextricably caught, but capable of lyrical observation of the smallest beauty they feel disconnected from. It seems as Coupland ages, he uses form more carefully and thoughtfully. In this novel, the formal constraints work well – the thrown voices (through various narrative tricks), the interjection of Bethany's mom, the parodied novel-in-progress are well-executed and fun to read. This novel also engages in a lot of play and fun that hearkens back to some of Coupland's earlier works. However, like many of his novels, the book tends to lose steam at the end. Is it that Coupland loses interest in his characters or just doesn't know what to do with them once they have taken over the text? While not disappointing, and the author doesn't veer off into Romanticism as is often his temptation, the ending is not particularly satisfying either. The Gum Thief is a good read, fun, funny and heartfelt, but not Coupland's best work. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Like many writers of critical reviews, I too sometimes think about the idea of one day penning an entire book-long series of essays about a particular artist -- and of all the artists in history that now exist, the one I'm perhaps most qualified at this point to write an entire critical book about would be Canadian author Douglas Coupland; I've read eight of his eleven novels now, the majority of them multiple times, along with a handful of his nonfiction books, all the short pieces he's ever published, and several hundred interviews with him that have been conducted over the last 17 years, not to mention a memorable experience actually meeting him in the year 2000. (In a nutshell, while at a Chicago reading he became obsessed with the fact that I'm deaf in one ear, and actually stopped his reading in the middle of it to ask me all these strange random questions about it.) And in this I don't think I'm too terribly different than a large group of other people my age; after all, it was Coupland who wrote 1991's Generation X, the book that literally coined the term for the generation (my generation), the first book to teach all of us that it was okay to dream of a different world than the trippy hairy mess our aging hippie bosses had created, that it is in fact a generational duty. I mean, sure, that single book eventually led us to an entire decade of unnecessary body scarification, Kevin Smith films, and drag queens hosting afternoon talk shows, but that's not Coupland's fault for writing the novel that started it all. Or is it? See, that's the kind of essay I'd write, if I ever wrote a book of essays about Coupland; and it'd be a cool book, too, I'm telling you!

That's why I was looking forward to reading through his latest, 2007's medium-sized and easily digestible The Gum Thief; because the three novels of Coupland's that I haven't gotten to yet read, frankly, are the last three he's published (2003's Hey Nostradamus!, 2004's Eleanor Rigby and 2006's JPod), not for any particular aesthetic reason but merely because I've been permanently broke throughout the 2000s, so I've been happily anticipating getting caught up with his ouevre ever since opening CCLaP a little less than a year ago. And indeed, The Gum Thief finds Coupland in fine if not terribly exciting form, just as is the case with the majority of his books; it'll take most people just a few days to get through it, and it provides exactly a few days worth of entertainment, a good matchup even while not exactly soaring to the heights of his absolute best work (so in other words, this is no Microserfs). On the Coupland Scale of Weirdness, this definitely tips in on the dark, sad and bitter side; more Life After God than Shampoo Planet, more an examination of the endless failures of life than of its few successes.

Because that's really the first thing to understand about Coupland, if you want a chance of deeply getting and enjoying his work; that he lives in this sorta little literary bubble of his own, where it's difficult to compare his plots and style and even way of working to any other writer except himself, and his books against any other books but his own. Coupland's world is a semi-surreal place but not a fully surreal one, a place where things just weird enough are always happening, events very much informed by popular culture and that are conveyed to us through the smooth, minimalist, elegant personal style that Coupland's past as an ad-agency copywriter has given him. It is not unusual within a Coupland story for time to stop, for apocalyptic events to take place, without any of these things being the main point of the story itself; Coupland's main point is always to examine the humanity inherent in each situation, even if it's a sometimes cold and irony-laced humanity that often has problems communicating with each other, and even if told in a much more clever and meta way than most character dramas are.

This is certainly the case with The Gum Thief; it is primarily the story of Roger, a middle-aged alcoholic who has just gone through a series of personal crises (divorce, death of a child, loss of a job), which now find him living in a basement studio apartment in a large anonymous city, sneaking vodka into his new day job as a clerk at office-supply store Staples just in order to make it through each soul-crushing day. Yeah, welcome to Coupland's world, chump! Because that's the thing that's often forgotten about his work, especially by his critics, or not even mentioned in the first place; that when Coupland is in a bad mood, he can be one of the most pathos-infused writers of our generation, painting portraits of human hopelessness and moral weakness that on the bleak scale fall just short of Russian epics about suicidal madmen in winter. The Gum Thief isn't a pleasant book, it isn't a pleasant book at all; it's a relentlessly grim and dour book, in fact, one that wallows in all the filth and garbage of the usual world, hoping merely that the fates of the various losers we meet along the way are somehow just a little bit better by the end, since "good" is too optimistic a fate to hope for.

Because that's the other thing; as the story continues, of course, Roger ends up gathering a host of deeply flawed characters around him as well, all because of a notebook he accidentally leaves in the store's breakroom one day, in which he is writing new fictional character sketches based on his real co-workers and half-heartedly contemplating taking up the challenge again of becoming a published author. It's because of this notebook and these fictional character studies that he then comes to the attention of co-worker Bethany, an overweight goth girl in her early twenties who unfortunately had a plethora of friends and relatives accidentally die around her during childhood. This, then, has left Bethany unsure of herself, sarcastic and bitter about life, unable to trust or love the people around her; so in other words, a perfect match and foil for Roger, someone who starts leaving snotty rambling letters in his notebook that admonish him to never acknowledge them out loud to her while actually on the clock at the store.

This then leads us to the main crux of the novel, which as usual with Coupland is a bit difficult to describe but enjoyable nonetheless. For example, partly this is about the growing complex relationship between Roger and Bethany, the way that their unspoken correspondence very slowly helps push each other to a point of awareness and healing they weren't at before. But also this is about the relationship between Roger and Bethany's mother DeeDee, yet another emotionally-scarred loser who it turns out had actually gone out with Roger on an dual-alcoholic date in the past, and who starts adding her own letters to the correspondence after finding out that Bethany and Roger have started conversing. But then, this is also the story of the new novel that Roger has been inspired by Bethany and DeeDee to sit down and finally write, a dreadful "comedy" called Glove Pond that is a transparent ripoff of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?; and it's not just the story of the novel itself (large chunks of which are interspersed among the letters), but also how the people around him react to the novel, with to us it being pretty obvious that the novel is awful but with Bethany and DeeDee impressed because of neither being familiar with the Albee original. And because of all this literary trickery, of course, the book ends up becoming something else as well -- a meta story, that is, a story about stories about stories about stories, with there in actuality being hardly any "real" dialogue in The Gum Thief at all, but rather an entire manuscript's worth of letters and emails and office memos and diary entries and novel excerpts and the like.

Now to be fair, there is also a fair dose here of all the things Coupland's critics complain about as well: over-reliance on pop-culture references, for one good example, a glib irony-worshipping writing style that is sure to turn a lot of people off right from the start. And Lord, don't even think about turning to a Coupland novel and expecting some sort of grand message, but rather be ready for a small story about small people that ultimately only says small and quiet things; this is why Generation X became as cultishly huge as it did, after all, is because Coupland never set out to write a book about an entire generation in the first place, but has admitted many times in interviews that he expected no one besides his own circle of friends to understand the point of the book at all. This is the sort of attitude you need to have about Coupland going into his novels, in order to truly appreciate them in a deep way; you need to see them as simple stories about specific people, but who by extension are then telling big stories about all of us in an untold way. And you need to go with Coupland down that road to get there, need to keep thinking about his ideas after the book itself is done; when you do this, he becomes much more than a MTV-friendly pop-culture guru, but actually a sophisticated chronicler of the human condition. That's why I keep reading Coupland and keep enjoying Coupland; it's why I ultimately recommend The Gum Thief as well, even though it will clearly never be thought of as one of Coupland's best. ( )

http://shelf-monkey.blogspot.com/2008... ( )

Dreary tale of North Van Staples employees with parallel novel-in-progress from one of them, enlivened by Coupland's bang-on observations and slacker humour. ( )

Coupland is back writing about normal people with mind-numbing jobs - this time at a stationery superstore. The main characters are Roger, a 40-something alcoholic divorcee, is writing a Cheeveresque novel, and Bethany, a 20 year old goth who's biding time waiting for something to happen with her life.
They don't talk to each other at work, but after Bethany discovers Roger's journal she starts writing him letters.
This modern take on a classic 'roman des lettres' manages to keep the plot moving well, alternating between the voices, and adding Bethany's mum, another letter writer later. Interspersed between the letters are the chapters of Roger's awful novel (imagine an American 'Abigail's party').
Enjoyable, but the ending is rushed and you feel slightly short-changed by it. ( )

Executed in the form of letters between the main characters, similar to Coupland's Hey Nostradamus, but much tighter more compelling story, perhaps because there is no agenda behind it. It is simply another story of "small lives", something the author has captured better than most contemporary authors. The pacing is excellent and Glove Pond, the novel within this novel, is tears to my eyes funny. My only disappointment came with the ending, as the book wrapped up, the tone and pace changed slightly, rushing to close a story arc in a way that was unsatisfying for me. ( )

The Gum Thief is the newest novel from Douglas Coupland, author of JPod and Generation X, and I've never read any of his other books so I don't know how his fans will feel about it, but I liked this book a lot.... read the rest at my blog at
http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2007... ( )

OK, cards on the table. I love Coupland's writing. He'll never be a storyteller, but what the hell, storytellers are hardly in short supply. I love him for his inventiveness, occasionally staggeringly poetic sentences, and the fact he creates characters and relationships that I actually care about.

Gum Thief is typical Coupland, and I loved it. If you like Coupland you'll love it too, and if you don't (like virtually all critics!) it won't change your mind.

Gum Thief has more in common with the more mature Hey Nostradamus and Eleanor Rigby than his last book JPod, charting the unlikely relationship (carried out exclusively through journals and letters.) between two Staples enployees - an alcoholic 40 something (Roger) and and 20 something Goth (Brittany).

Roger is writing a novel, Glove Pond, and a good third of the book is actually Roger's novel. Coupland pulls of an amazing trick, making Glove Pond both complete rubbish and utterly compelling. Glove Pond is a story of two writers, and contains extracts of their novel, so we got a novel within a novel within a novel. Contrived or inventive? I go for the latter.

If you've never read any of his work this is as good a starting place as any. ( )

Coupland's books are never boring, but after the vitality and invention of JPod this felt tired and the supporting structure of the (admittedly frequently amusing) failed Cheeveresque novella to me felt suspect. I found that and the omnipresent fragementation of the novel as a whole stretched my ability to connect. ( )

It's sadder and more grown-up than JPod. But it's also more intricate with stories within stories. ( )

I received Gum Thief from amazon.com today, and have just now finished it up, about 6 hours later or so. Great book that I was not able to put down once I got about 1/4 of a way into it. I thought the structure of the book - several different people's viewpoints and a novel within a novel - was going to be distracting, but it ended up having a great sense of suspense and Coupland was able to keep the plot moving along seamlessly. Once again Coupland touches on so many thoughts and feelings I have and gives them a voice. ( )