The Gum Thief

Last Book Read: The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland

December 21st, 2012:  What better day than to start reading a Douglas Coupland novel? (which always contain an impending sense of apocalypse, whether explicit or implicit)  The Gum Thief  follows a pretty straightforward Coupland formula: dysfunctional Mcjob workers contemplate their own significance in the superficial, bland consumer world.  Of literary interest, all of the interaction between characters is through written correspondence, mostly a shared journal, but also email and Fed-Exed letters.  Within the journal, Roger, a disillusioned Staples worker, writes a novel (a complete take off of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf).  And, within that novel, the sub-character Kyle writes a novel about Staples workers.  The resulting story within a story within a story (within a book within a book) creates a inside/outside/inside infinite regress Mobius loop.  Along the way the usual Coupland-esqe characters speak in a way that no real person does (well, almost no one[1], however, this is addressed in the last chapter): full of witty pop culture references and cutting criticism - cataloging the interesting and bland details of life in the early twenty-first century.

Perhaps more interesting is Coupland's analysis of his own work in context.   In "A Conversation with Douglas Coupland: The Hideous, the Cynical, and the Beautiful" [2] Coupland reflects on the time period and events that has inspired his work. While he has tried to distance himself from postmodern styles in his writing, there is no way to remove his work from postmodernity. Here he discusses Marxism in relation to the Jameson-style capitalism discussed in his novels, as well as Fukuyama's end of history.  Two points of history seem to emerge as significant: 1991 and 2001.  1991, the year Generation X was published, was the emergence from the Cold War into uncharted temporal and political territory (and I would argue the end of modernity).  Any optimism of possibility ended ten years later on 9/11.  The constant anxiety of apocalypse found in Coupland's work began as the fear of the Cold War turned hot and the resulting MAD.  In actuality 9/11 brought that danger to us on a much smaller but much closer scale.  His work for the last ten years always contains elements of dealing with that (as well as gun violence in the case of Hey, Nostradamus).  The end of the structured order of modernity has brought us unhindered late-capitalism and political danger and uncertainty, resulting in the empty "blankness" of contemporary life that Coupland so aptly describes.  Although he sees 9/11 as history reasserting itself and negating Fukuyama's theory that history has ended, his description of the end if the twentieth century suggests that history has disappeared at the personal level: 

I remember the 70s were like a pit. The 80s were about climbing out of the pit. The 90s were actually kind of a golden age, because things were good. So I’m glad we had that final bubble. . . I think 2001 was the last year that we actually think of as being a year. Like, the 20th century was 1989, 1990, 1991. But what’s 2002? What’s 2003? It’s like buying gas or something. It’s not even time. It’s something else. We don’t have that bubble of modernity that just accidentally happened to be encapsulated by the 20th century. Lately, we just have this yawning, gaping infinity. We’re in a vacuum. Fear of the vacuum. 

Curiously, I think the last decade has been one with absolutely no defining style of its own. Like, nothing. You can’t look at something and say, “That’s really 2007.” There’s just nothing. And the only real defining style of the decade, aside from maybe Apple products, is the aggregation of lots of small objects. . .

What are we left with from the last decade?  We have ever evolving, stylized personal technology.  But, that is about it.  We have style over substance and form over content, leaving just a blank structure of culture. This superficiality is perhaps best portrayed in 1992's Shampoo Planet.   In the aftermath of 9/11 we now have economic collapse and the constant danger of getting stuck where we are.  As he illustrates it: "We’re now in an age of earthquakes. It’s just never going to stop.  9/11 was the first domino in that process."

Coupland has an accurate and detailed take on contemporary culture that no one else seems to be discussing.  This particular interview had numerous points of interest and it suggests that we could benefit from Coupland's thought if he would take a break from having fictional characters speak for him and write a work of analysis.


[1] Coupland's characters seem to be hyper versions of himself, amplifying the unique way he articulates and conceptualizes, but quite different from most people in the real world.

[2] Gray, Brenna Clarke "A Conversation with Douglas Coupland: The Hideous, the Cynical, and the Beautiful." Studies in Canadian Literature. Volume 36, Number 2.

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