The gum thief - BookWyrm

cmonster reviewed The gum thief by Douglas Coupland

Review of 'The gum thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

At last, [author: Douglas Coupland] shows that [book:Girlfriend in a Coma] was not an aberration. His new book is imaginative, different from all the rest and gripping.

Gum Thief tells the story of three people connected through a Staples office supply store in British Columbia. But it's not written like a normal novel. Instead, Coupland tells the story through the writings of the various characters. He starts with journal entries by Roger, moves on to faux-journal entries roger writes in the voice of Bethany who then finds his journal and writes back to him. Soon, letters from her mother, his ex-wife, their co-workers and more become intertwined with a novel that is very similar to [book:Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf], which Roger is writing. All of it tells their stories.

Like Coupland's other books, I had a hard time putting this one down just because I wanted to find out what happened to each person. Like his other best characters, these people, for the most part, felt like real people I might meet.

Admittedly, there were moments when the book got somewhat weighed down and slow. At least one of the characters (Bethany's mother) felt like more of a sketch than a full person, but for the most part, this book is an excellent return to form for Coupland.

Subjects

Staples (Firm) -- Employees -- Fiction

Divorced men -- Fiction

Intergenerational relations -- Fiction

Fiction -- Authorship -- Fiction

Tim Hutton reviewed The gum thief by Douglas Coupland

"Maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life."