A review by colin_cox
The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

5.0

Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief is a complex web of narratives, letters, confessions, and journal entries that sits comfortably within a postmodern sensibility that challenges conventional notions of what a text can (and should) be. At the end of The Gum Thief, the book's protagonist, Roger, receives a scathing critique of the novel itself, which disrupts established notions of authorship. In this critique, his instructor writes, "Locationwise, your book takes place in your own day-to-day world, and that's wrong...Staples? I can go there any time and experience it myself. I don't need or want art that tells me about my daily life. I want art that tells me about somebody--anybody--else but me" (273-274). What this instructor misses is a question that Coupland grapples with in many of his books: as an aesthetic form, what does the novel have left to offer a reader? Furthermore, and from a structural perspective, what can the novel offer or contribute that it hasn't already? Considering The Gum Thief from a formalist perspective explains why Coupland offers his reader a little bit of everything from the novel's stylistic history. Epistolary blends with conventional narration which blends with unreliable narration (which, at times, appears quite reliable) which blends with journal entries and so on. Coupland's formal playfulness reflects postmodernism's preoccupation with lost authority, and skepticism toward authority quickly emerges as a dominant theme throughout the novel itself.

I have returned to The Gum Thief four or five times since reading it in graduate school. I do so in moments of intense vulnerability because Coupland's narrative playfulness and structural instability produce, ironically enough, relief. The novel's vulnerability coupled with my own, double-negatives my anxiety, creating an odd sort of tranquility.