“Wildly differing perspectives merge beautifully into one cohesive look at loneliness and despair. Yes, Coupland is dark and cutting about our fluorescent-lit times, but there's also a real underlayer of gratitude here, for the hand that can reach down and unite with you in the darkness. A–.”—Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly


Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, “aisles associates” at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger’s opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger’s unsettled—and unsettling—life.


Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them…and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.


Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also works in visual arts and theater. His novels include Eleanor Rigby, Generation X, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, and JPod. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. In Douglas Coupland's witty novel we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger's co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6. One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she's never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, he is getting her right.
These two retail workers then strike up an epistolary relationship that unfolds alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief reveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life. "Mr. Coupland remains a funny novelist, but he has become a poignant one as well."—The Wall Street Journal


"[The Gum Thief] abounds in catchy turns of phrase and personal observations from the characters' points of view on topics ranging from asteroid belts to the colors of the Italian flag.  Many of the funniest passages include ruminations about office supplies, those who buy them and the outlets where they are sold . . . Without giving anything away, the ending is just as compelling and subtle as the rest of Coupland's brilliant novel."—Richard Melo, The Portland Oregonian


"Right from the get-go we’re deep in Coupland country with The Gum Thief: the über-now pop culture references, the casual, deliciously snide vernacular, the loopy, neurotic characters you can’t help but love, and of course, the late-night conversational tone of Coupland himself, whose writing reads like a phone call from an old friend. No one else quite captures the dystopian malaise of our post-postmodernist consumer-junkie culture quite like he does. Call it CoMo: Coupland Modernism. In this, his 11th novel, Coupland introduces us to Roger Thorpe, a divorced, middle-aged 'sales associate' at Staples, plodding through his forties while avoiding the latest office furniture shipment and drinking himself into oblivion. Enter Bethany, goth girl and Staples co-worker, who strikes up an unusual and touching correspondence with Roger, their lives unfolding alongside Roger’s abysmal novella-in-progress, Glove Pond. The novel-within-the-novel is a delightful device – reading bad writing has never been more fun. Or funny. Through the letters Roger and Bethany share, Coupland presents the deadening banality of the contemporary moment. How we drive from parking lot to parking lot, trapped in one big-box store after another, waiting in line for The End of the World. Like Coupland’s other novels, there’s a feeling of pre-apocalyptic anxiety in the lives of Roger and Bethany. And yet, as in Generation X, it is through their shared friendship, and their stories, that Roger and Bethany transcend the meaninglessness of their lives."—Christine Walde, Quill & Quire


"The Gum Thief is classic Douglas Coupland. His characters are young and disaffected—they have opted out of modern life because, well, if modern life is cloning, carbon footprints and ‘Sno-Kone cellulite’, what kind of moron would opt in? ‘Just because you've been born and made it through high school doesn't mean society can't still abort you,’ says Bethany, the teen-goth, contemplating the rejects in her workplace. But don't think that this is a novel about how modern life is rubbish, and we're all going to cop out and play MySpace instead. It is much more hopeful, more touching and more Couplandesque than that. When Bethany writes those words, it is actually Roger—her middle-aged dropout colleague—writing in her voice. This is a novel so postmodern that it has disappeared up its own irony and come out on the other side. In anyone else's hands, it could read like an environmental treatise by Al Gore translated by a teenage dirtbag after 17 vodka Red Bulls. But Coupland's skill is in his love of the ridiculous, like a schoolboy whose words make him giggle . . . The last chapter, a critique of Roger's book by a patronising creative-writing teacher, is a nice touch. Its tone, he says, is too ‘smug’. Coupland's novel is anything but."—Katy Guest, The Independent (UK)


"Coupland is dark and cutting about our fluorescent-lit times, but there's also a real underlayer of gratitude here, for the hand that can reach down and unite with you in the darkness."—Entertainment Weekly


"Relentlessly contemporary Coupland helped explode the Gen-X mind-set, and now follows his specimens as they stumble into their inevitable midlife crisis. Roger, a forty-something alcoholic washup and aisle-jockey at Staples ponders the unlikelihood of escaping one's pitiable little life. Another soul trapped in the sterile confines is Bethany, a goth girl with her own private disaster of a life. The two form an unlikely friendship in this cleverly crafted, bitterly funny epistolary novel, while at the same time Roger works on his own novel, a Cheever-like exercise wherein bitter couples lob witty insults at each other while drowning in Scotch and failure . . . Chronicling life's crises that don't only happen in the middle, Coupland . . . is almost always very clever—rather than heartfelt as his creations slowly tick off the things that they will never become."—Ian Chipman, Booklist


"Bethany, transitioning from goth teen to adult, and Roger, flailing in his forties, have washed up at Staples, a modern circle of hell where employees mindlessly rearrange office paraphernalia. In their world, security footage of th