Review of Douglas Coupland's 'The Gum Thief'

The Gum ThiefBy Douglas Coupland. 275 pages. $24.95; £10.99, Bloomsbury.

Tolstoy thought that "The Seagull" was a terrible play, and that Chekhov should never have put a writer in it. "There aren't many of us, and no one is really interested," Tolstoy told a friend. Yet over the decades memorable protagonists in books as different as "Cakes and Ale," "Misery," "The Information," "Lunar Park" and Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels have been writers. And if Tolstoy's fellow Russians had paid attention to him, there would be no "Doctor Zhivago," no "Master and Margarita" and no "Pale Fire." Fiction is drawn to writers for its heroes, and to writing itself for its subject matter.

Douglas Coupland's new novel, "The Gum Thief," puts the act of writing center stage. The book is not conventionally narrated, but told obliquely, through an assemblage of writings and letters, from which the reader reconstructs the story like the pieces of an Ikea wardrobe.

The book's central character is a thwarted writer. Puffy-looking, 40-something Roger is lost, stuck, divorced and sleep-walking through a job he despises at Staples. Roger is a closed, clamlike soul, trailing a U-Haul of emotional baggage and dosing himself with vodka to get through the day. He's a version of the person you often see in coffee shops, sitting alone, nursing a cold Americano and urgently filling a yellow legal pad with screeds of confessional material written in capital letters. Peering over his shoulder as you pass his chair, you find yourself trying to read what he's written and wondering: madman? bore? genius?

Read the full review on iht.com here.

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