When are Otis & Co. going to implement half stars? Because I'd like to give this book four and a half stars.I loved this book. It's not often that a book makes me laugh out loud, and this book consistently made me laugh out loud. Peals of laughter. Giggles. Cackles, even. I’m not exaggerating.It’s also very sad, sweet, and affecting all at the same time. I love books wherein the characters ruminate. I get most of my own ruminating done in the shower, but these characters do it on paper in a series of letters to one another.Told in a series of journal entries, it is the story of an unlikely friendship between Roger and Bethany, two coworkers at a Staples office supply store. They differ in age and lifestyle, but they end up forming a strong bond after Bethany finds Roger’s diary in the break room and sees that he has written an entry from her point of view. She begins to write to Roger in the diary, and their relationship continues in that manner for the rest of the book. Eventually, Bethany’s mother, DeeDee, starts writing letters to Roger, and hers are some of the best chapters in the book. While all of this is going on, Roger is writing a novel that is reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. We are treated, because it is a treat to read about Steve and Gloria, to chapters of Roger’s novel throughout The Gum Thief. Naturally, the reader, as well as Bethany and DeeDee, become fascinated by this novel within a novel.Sometimes when I read a book, I like to put my favorite quotes in my review. With this book, I found so many gems that it would be difficult to document all of them here. I can’t resist adding just a few, though.RogerIt’d be nice if we had a course in school called Real Life. Forget don’t-drink-and-drive videos and plastic models of the uterus. Imagine a class where they sit you down and spell everything out, deploying all of that information delivered to us by our ever-growing army of wise, surviving ninetysomethings……Falling out of love happens as quickly as falling in.…Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.…Animals spend time with you only if you feed them.…People armed with shopping carts who know what they want and where they’re going will always cream clueless people standing in the middle of aisles holding vague shopping lists.…Time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your midthirties.My Theory of the Day is that the moment your brain locks into its permanent age, whoosh, it flips a time switch and your life zooms forward like a Japanese bullet train. Or the Road Runner. Or a 747. The point being that your soul is left behind in a cloud of dust.BethanyThere’s such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn’t expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species, or shit, according to Yahoo!, pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder. The few animals that remain here with us – when they look at me, or when I hear them cheep or bleat or meow – they’re not animals anymore, they’re the voices of the dead trying to warn us of what’s coming. According to government statistics, I’m supposed to leave the world in 2062, but I can’t even see 2032 in my head.And, finally, a little bit of Glove Pond.Gloria: “Balans chairs? Those are the chairs with no backs and all the pressure is on your knee-“Steve: “Yes, yes.”Gloria: “I saw a PBS documentary on them. They’ll soon be replacing every chair on earth.”Steve: “Wretched things. God, I hate the present.”Steve, sometimes I do, too.
Just a warning: I haven't reviewed things much so I apoligies in advance if this review is awful.Recommended and lent to me by my sister. I now realise why she told me to read this book. I was into this book the moment I started reading it. From the begining it gets you thinking about your own life and there's plenty of moments in this book that you can relate to yourself. It had me thinking more and more about how I'm getting older and doing nothing with my life, that if I don't do something about it I will end up like Roger. A grumpy middle aged person who is working at a low paid job like staples and that will be all I'll ever amount to. Another thing this book made me think about is how much I want to write to people because all this texting and messaging has made us so lazy. I want to go back to having the personal feel of reading a letter and all the things they write to you (oh wow, I just made myself sound like I'm about 70, haha. 46 years to go till then).There were moments when I found this book hilarious (so did my boyfriend as I heard him laughing manically to himself when reading some of this book), there were times when I felt sadness and really felt for these characters. But occasional times I couldn't connect so much with them. But it was very occasional so wasn't much of an issue.I also enjoyed the story glove pond and even though it was terrible I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I personally think Douglas Coupland did a good job with adding that story into the book without us getting lost with what was going on with that and the main story. I've read reviews for this book and have seen that a lot of fans aren't so impressed with this book compared to Douglas' other book. If this is the case, this is the first book of his I read but certainly won't be the last. I really enjoy his style of writing and will be looking forward to reading more of his books.
What do You think about The Gum Thief (2007)?
Give me back my precious time, Douglas Coupland!! I like your books, esp. Hey, Nostradamus, but this was too "experimental" for my taste. It had its high points, like that funny thing about that middle-aged man, Roger, pretending to be the teenaged Goth, Bethany, in a diary THAT SHE OF COURSE FOUND OUT ABOUT, and that genius inclusion of a chapter-by-chapter progress of the novel, Glove Pond, Roger was writing, that (in)coincidentally reflects the flow of the main story, but it had more low points to go on to, like the fact that it tried too hard and became too preachy and boring. I'm not hard to please, Mr. Coupland, nor am I hard to annoy, but whoa, I couldn't believe it would be one of your books that would turn those two into the opposite.Yay!s-"A job is something you can do for life. A job has some dimension of hope to it." (p.17)-"Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want." (p.56)-"My dear, the reason we wear makeup is to prevent the world from seeing what we're like underneath." (p.116)-Coupland's musings about the weirdness of life and death never fail to amuse me.Boo!s-I was okay with the he-says, she-says at first, but when it became a four-or-more-way thing going, I had to close the book for a while to yell, "DOUGLAS, YOU TIME THIEF!!"-That said, the characters aren't people you'd ever want to be friends with.-It gets to a point where this actually comes to you: DOUGLAS, IS THIS YOUR DIARY??
—kb
I became a fan of Douglas Coupland's writing after I checked out Generation X from the library when I was in high school. I've read a number of his books and his one, The Gum Thief is one of my favorites, along with Generation X and Life After God. Most Coupland novels are full of unrealistic plot twists that somehow bind the characters. This book is more straightforward and realistic in its storyline. The novel is told through letters and writing samples that the characters share. And while it is touted on its sleeve as "The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore," that doesn't quite adequately describe the feel of this novel. It is set in a Staples, but it is not about the looming apocalypse. The characters are struggling to dig through the doldrums of everyday life. They more concerned with being stuck in their current existence than overbearingly fearful of some impending doom. The love stories that seem to intertwine through the book are not the anchor of the characters' passions. Instead, between the book within the book and the exposes of correspondence, the main love for the characters is the cathartic act of writing. Overall, this novel reads as Coupland's most realistic novel in a long time.
—Darin Strachan
I’ve always admired the fact that Douglas Coupland can exploit metafiction and postmodern absurdity while still remaining within the limits of ‘commercial fiction’. His novels are real stories, which go somewhere, and have characters that learn things. They can be read as a literary exercise OR just a good yarn.But, with The Gum Thief, Coupland seems to have gotten tired of playing by the rules of commercial fiction. The novel is unashamedly full of tricksy postmodernism and characters that are obstinate and unlikeable. There are no dramatic set pieces or surges of emotion. The Gum Thief is a story within a story within a story – and none of those stories provide the easy satisfaction that comes when a good plot is tied up in a neat bow.The novel is, ostensibly, about an aging, alcoholic, would-be author, who works at Staples and begins exchanging letters with a goth co-worker. In fact, this is merely a frame that allows Coupland to skewer the pretensions of the writing profession. Writers are ripe for satire, but even I – who has observed or experienced many of the things that Coupland satirizes, such as ridiculous creative writing exercises and lauded authors who haven’t written a word in years – found the subject an insubstantial basis for a novel.The Gum Thief is well-written, well-observed and frequently amusing. But, ultimately, there’s no there there. The characters are hard to engage with; the storyline is nonexistent. It’s as pointless a read as all the writing exercises that come out of creative writing classes.
—Nicola
