The Gum Thief

 
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The Gum Thief returns the reader to territory all too familiar to Coupland fans. This is suburban mall-land, the endless, soulless sprawl of North American retail parks. Like much of the rest of Couplandland, it is populated by the high school dropouts and middle-aged losers still enslaved to McJobs, epitomised by the book’s focal point: an outlet of the office supplies megachain, Staples.

Roger has lost so much in life – his marriage, a child, a sense of direction and purpose. His frustrated spiral even puts his job at Staples at risk. He doesn't want to be an ‘aisles associate’(!) overseeing the tidiness of the ballpoint pen display for the rest of his life; he actually wants to write and thus put those writing tools to good use. So he writes a diary, which, bizarrely, he leaves lying in the staff room. That is, of course, asking for trouble, especially as he writes about colleagues. He seems to understand them, however, as illustrated by his ability to put words into the mouth of Bethany, the store's resident Goth. When she reads the entry in her own name, she decides to add her own comments and thus begins a very peculiar relationship, about which they agree never actually to speak. It is only carried out on paper (hence is akin to the 'friendships' enjoyed by the Facebook generation). There is, however, a slightly unnerving sense of reality. For while we are told that Bethany's second entry is from the 'real' Bethany, we are never subsequently told who is actually talking - the real or the figment. The lines of reality are blurred from the start. This all points to the book's central conceit: the meaning of the written word and its ability – or inability – to describe reality. It is presumably no accident, then, that the book is epistolary in form and set in a stationery store.

Like all Coupland's protagonists, these people are troubled – about their lives, about their relationships, and even about God if he is there. That is what makes them so intriguing. They purport to be representatives of the (post)modern everyman and everywoman. Here is Roger, right at the book’s opening:

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. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margaret, the cast members of Rent, Vaclav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal. Do you want out? Do you often wish you could be somebody, anybody, other than who you are – the you who holds a job and feeds a family – the you who keeps a relatively okay place to live and who still tries to keep your friendships alive? In other words, the you who’s going to remain pretty much the same until the casket? (p. 1)

As ever in Coupland's world, the Damocles sword of human mortality is ever present. However, death seems preferable to the interminable drudgery of an aisles associate:

The last while has been kind of rough and, yeah, I’m having trouble these days, but Joan [ex-wife] isn’t what you’d call a fountain of sympathy. I can make up all the excuses I want, but the fact is, I merely lie in my bed in the morning and don’t get out. Especially at this time of year. I ask you, why do we even bother having wakefulness? Dreams are way more interesting than real life, and in dreams you never have to get out of bed. For that matter, why does life bother going forward? No matter what organism you look at . . . an amoeba or an elk or whatever, it does everything it can to advance itself – it tries not to be killed, it tries to mate, it tries to not be eaten. What’s the nature of this divine computer program that drives everything to go forward? Why doesn’t DNA sometimes say to itself, ‘You know what? I’m tired of this survival s***. I think I'm going to pack it in. It ends here.’ (p. 187)

It is not just present circumstances or an unknown future that Roger yearns to escape. His searing, wry honesty gets to the heart of the matter – his own heart:

It’s amazing how you can be a total s***head, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you. Souls ought to have the legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds: I draw the line at cheating at golf; I draw the line at theft over $100,000; I draw the line at bestiality. Imagine all the souls of the world, out on the sides of highways, all of them hitchhiking to try to find new places to live, all of them holding signs designed to lure you into selecting them as a passenger: . . . I sing! . . . I tell jokes . . . I know shiatsu. . . I know Katherine Hepburn. I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts. (p. 22)

But Roger is not alone. Bethany feels the agony of mortality acutely. Throughout her life, those closest to her have died, hence her Goth affectation and cosmetic obsession with death and the 'dark side'. She eventually snaps out of that, but of course that doesn't remove her core fears and anxieties:

Oh God, I’m sitting here and my inner voice won’t shut up. Do you ever get that? All you crave is silence, but instead you sit there and, against your wishes, nag yourself at full volume? Money! Loneliness! Failure! Sex! Body! Enemies! Regrets! And everybody’s doing the same thing – friends, family, that lady at the gas station till, your favourite movie star – everybody’s skull is buzzing with me, me, me, me, me, and nobody knows how to shut it off. We’re a planet of selfish me-robots. I hate it. I try to turn it off. The only thing that works is if I try to imagine what it’s like to be inside someone else’s head, try to imagine what their inner nagging is. It cools my brain . . . God, I’m so sick of myself. Oh Roger, I truly wish I’d had religion growing up, because believing in something might shut off my inner voice – and maybe also so that I could feel like I shared something with my family, a common vision. All I got from my family is death, divorce and desertion. Please come up with ideas to share with Zoë [Roger's daughter]. She’ll probably hate you until she’s twenty-one, but after that she’ll thank you forever. You’re so lucky to have the chance to not screw somebody up. (p. 248)

Isn't she getting rather close to a biblical analysis of human nature with this outburst? Of course, it doesn't cross theological Ts, but it does suggest the pounding ache to overcome the sinful nature. What is more, she seems to recognise that a religious worldview would help to deal with that.

Within their bizarre, paperbound relationship, Beth and Roger share a private universe, which goes by the curious name of Glove Pond, Roger embryonic novel. Beth has her own attempts at creative writing with her absurd studies on the life of pieces of toast. But Glove Pond is the primary focus and it is excruciatingly, but wonderfully, bad! It includes a narrative about Steve, a drunken, loser novelist, and his hopeless actress wife, Gloria; another couple (successful writer Kyle Falconcrest and his medic wife Brittany) comes to dinner, but their rivalry simmers throughout the evening. Part of Roger and Beth's fun is that characters' names in Glove Pond correspond to some of the other workers at Staples. Like them, Steve and Gloria are living empty lives, with everything masked by not particularly convincing façades. This is especially apparent when the conversations turn to Steve and Gloria’s son. Does he exist or not?

Coupland is playing mind games with us: he is writing a book about Roger who is writing a diary, in which he includes excerpts from the novel that he is writing about a writer called Steve who peeks jealously at Kyle's latest manuscript about a loser called Norm. Keeping track of which book we are in at any one time is enough to give one a headache; but that is precisely the point. It is a vortex of meanings and references, so complex that one completely loses one’s sense of place and reality. And yet, despite our confusion, there is a real poignancy even here because Roger’s character Kyle can see what is really going on with Steve and Gloria. They are lost souls, cloaking profound grief with drink and drudgery (just like Roger himself in 'real life'):

What, he wondered, could have happened to two people to damage them so badly? What sort of event could warp them, or any of us, to the point where they became mere cartoons of the real and whole people they once were?

This ‘smoke and mirrors’ world of multiple personalities is reflected by Bethany's view of the world. It is as if Coupland is constantly confronting us with the question, ‘So what if you can't tell what's real or not? What's real anyway?’ The Goth thing for Bethany was simply a lifestyle statement, easily discarded when it no longer suited her. Hers is a casual approach to life and identity, which presumably explains her hilariously absurd treatment of the ethical complexities of human cloning:

Speaking of biology, I think cloning is great. I don’t understand why churchy people get so upset about it. God made the originals, and cloning is only making photocopies. Big woo. And how can people get upset about evolution? Someone had to start the ball rolling; it’s only natural to try to figure out the mechanics of how it got rolling. Relax! One theory doesn’t exclude the other. (p. 7)

Bethany is no fool; her perceptions of the vacuity of modern life are acute:

But what was the universe thinking when it came up with Christmas? Hey, let’s wreck six weeks of the year with guilt and loneliness and unnecessary cheesy crap! And then let’s invent office superstores where they can take everyday stuff like pens and glossy printer paper and commit an emotional travesty by suggesting these items as gift ideas for loved ones! (p. 233)

Coupland has the last laugh, though, in the book's conclusion, which I will not reveal here. But it certainly explains why so many of the boundaries between 'truth' and fiction are blurred, why the aches endured by so many of the characters are shared. Coupland thus even further distances the reader's perception of reality. For who, actually, is Roger at all? We never really discover.

The Gum Thief ends up being much more satisfying than the early pages suggest, and it throws up Coupland's same old questions about truth, identity, hope and meaning, but in an innovative and provocative way. Nevertheless, this is Coupland's twelfth novel. I cannot help wondering whether or not he will ever find the answers he is looking for. If not, his characters will presumably have to endure their endless, and thus fruitless, search in the ‘burb malls of North America. This is heart-breaking, because there are at least some answers out there, even if we are never promised all the answers. For in Jesus Christ, we are offered an identity that is rooted, not random or self-originating; and we have a hope that is able to stare our mortality in the face without blinking.

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