Written by Douglas Coupland
“Everyone who works with me is either already damaged or else they’re embryos waiting to be damaged, fresh out of school and slow as a 1999 modem. Just because you’ve been born and made it through high school doesn’t mean society can’t still abort you. Wake up.”
Ahh…what would we do without Douggie. 
I burned through The Gum Thief in a single day — that’s usually a good sign that I’m reading something quite special.
This is a book that takes the heartfelt branch of Coupland’s work to more metaphorical heights. Unlike Hey, Nostradamus, this book doesn’t fizzle out at the end. Unlike Girlfriend in a Coma, this book doesn’t crawl into a metaphorical cul-de-sac and die of pretention.
The Gum Thief is sad and melancholy. It takes two completely opposite people, at two ends of the life experience spectrum, who find that they can only communicate in the most unorthodox of ways. They’ve been battered by the most insidious aspect of life: the mundane, conformist, every day monotony of work — being ground into nothingness by the unstoppable machine of progress.
The younger one doesn’t think there’s much in the future…the older one is a chewed-up-and-spit-out victim of the past. They meet through a novel named Glove Pond, being written in the staff room…and the resulting friendship takes us on a fascinating journey of self-discovery.
“There’s such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn’t expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species or, shit, according to Yahoo! , pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”
All the usual Couplandisms are on display: the wit and humour (on several occasions I laughed long and hard…dangerous when reading in the bath tub), and the effortless command of pop culture, both sublime and ridiculous. What’s new is that, for the first time, instead of a master playing with his favourite toy, Coupland launches into his first implicit criticism of a pop-culture-obsessed world…and the result is something quite brilliant.
Coupland never lectures — he lets his characters simply live their shambomlic lives, and educate by experience & example. He fills the novel with the vaccuous, the innane, the caricatured, and the despised (are ALL Staples stores like that? 
)…mixing them together without judgement. He leaves all the decisions to the the reader…and then throws a curve ball.
The faux-novel Glove Pond runs throughout the book — an arch, overly-dramatic & ridiculous Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf riff that manages to examine the issues of the novel’s main characters and shed subtle and terrifying light upon them. But it’s far more than Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor on acid…it’s the entire novel in microcosm, and in Coupland’s hands, it becomes an incredibly profound experience. A parallel continuum that is so incisive that, on more than one occasion, it gave me chills. This pseudo-storyline acts as a microscope on the “real” events of the novel…making those events all the more tragic & poignant.
A surprise on many levels, The Gum Thief is easily the most mature novel Douglas Coupland has ever written. It’s a novel that confirms to my mind that he is the best Canadian author of his generation…and that no matter how old he becomes, his heart and mind will always in tune to the pulse of our living, ever-changing society.
Simply wonderful.
