Sunday 28 October 2007

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

The Gum Thief
Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury

YOU CAN always rely on Douglas Coupland. The Canadian who wrote Generation X, Microserfs and a host of hits can be trusted to produce a warming story of paisanos battling the odds to become a success.

Not this time.

His paisanos this time are the serfs of Staples, the office supply giant. But this is a deeply depressed book.

Roger, our hero, is an unrecovering alcoholic, with a tragedy in his past and a novel in his notebook.

He's writing a Thin-Man-esque - at least in theory - dialogue of wit and wisdom, and he's been working on it for years.

Bethany, his colleague in Staples, is a young Goth. One day she discovers that Roger is also writing her into his notebooks - he's keeping a diary that pretends to be hers, and it's eerily accurate. Roger's a literary stalker.

A series of first-person narratives take off from these roots - but as a reader, I found myself muttering "If you're so clever, why amn't I interested?"

Coupland is playing with words and images and misery in his novel; there's not much story in evidence, though.

I was dying to love this book, but I couldn't. It's full of wry, ironic, incisive postmodern insights. Just not a lot happening.

But don't take my word for it - after all, my judgment isn't infallible; I hated Scorsese's Taxi Driver, still do. Maybe it's a masterpiece.

xxx stars

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