Product Description

Meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged 'aisles associate' at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of paper for the rest of his life, and his co-worker, Bethany, who's at the end of her Goth phase and realising she's facing fifty more years of shelving Post-it notes and replenishing the Crayola boutique in Aisle Six.One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy who she's never considered to be quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her - and weirdly, he's getting it right. She learns he has a tragedy in his past, and suddenly he no longer seems like a paper-stocking robot in a red shirt and a name tag.These two retail workers then strike up an unlikely yet touching secret correspondence. As their lives unfold, so too do the characters of Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly, horribly wrong.On every page of this wise, witty and unforgettable novel, Coupland reminds us that love, death and eternal friendship can all occur where and when we least expect them and that, even after tragedy has hit, one can still find solace in the comedy and strange comforts of modern life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16677 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'Coupland is possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today' Guardian Praise for JPOD: 'A dazzling comic novel, confirming that there is on current form no finer novelist writing in English' Literary Review 'There is brilliance at work in JPod. Not to mention more LOLs than you could shake a bong at. Mom must be so proud.' LA Times 'An extraordinary book, wide-ranging and wildly inventive' London Review of Books

A big-box chain store is the setting for depressing existential reflection in the latest from Coupland (JPod, 2006, etc.).Roger - middle-aged, divorced, a self-described failure - is a clerk at Staples. He keeps a journal, in which he sometimes impersonates his young, Goth coworker Bethany. Bethany finds this journal and, after a brief protest about the creepiness of Roger's identity theft, begins recording her own actual thoughts and responses to Roger's entries in the same notebook. This diary also contains Glove Pond, Roger's novel in progress. Kyle, a character in Glove Pond, is writing a novel about a middle-aged guy who works at a superstore. Coupland has employed postmodern literary methods to excellent effect in the past, but this setup is too cute and claustrophobic even for him. The epistolary novel is nearly as strict in its formal demands as a sestina, and it's about as difficult to execute well. Coupland deserves credit for avoiding some of the grosser sins of the form, like characters with an embarrassingly artificial fondness for exposition or the ability to reconstruct conversations and scenarios with perfect recall. Roger and Bethany write like ordinary people write, but that's not exactly a formula for compelling fiction, particularly in an age when the innermost thoughts of ordinary people are available in abundance - some might say superabundance - to anyone with a dial-up connection. Roger and Bethany are also barely distinguishable, and their obsessions - personal mortality, the end of the world - are the same as those of just about every other voice in the novel (Bethany's mother, Roger's ex-wife and a few others contribute correspondence). These are, of course, universal human concerns, but there's so much uniformity to the way various characters explore these themes that it's difficult to see them as real people with real stories, and not just proxies for an author grappling with his own advancing age.Like watching someone with multiple-personality disorder have a midlife crisis. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Times
Funny; genuinely, embarrass-yourself-on-a-plane funny. The Gum Thief sometimes reads like a more cleverly executed version of Breakfast of Champions.

Daily Mail
A tender and hopeful story that shows how, with friendship and the occasional little act of rebellion, there can still be laughter after tragedy.

Customer Reviews

it passes the time
I'm a big fan of dc, ever since he turned my head with generation x. this book is not up to that or any of his great books standards but it is an interesting read all the same. as always he obverses life pretty keenly and the dynamic between the characters is good. i read it on trains and planes and that is the prefect place for it.

Kiss my face. This is a great read.
Ignore all the doommongers and beardstrokers. 'Its not as good as this, its not as long as that, it does quite smell like the last one'. Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. The Gum Thief is truly excellent. If you read it and don't enjoy it, you were probably killed last year or at the very least paralysed from the neck up in a horrific lawnmower accident.

Live to work - no ... work to live.
Coupland is back writing about normal people with mind-numbing jobs - this time at a stationery superstore. The main characters are Roger, a 40-something alcoholic divorcee, is writing a Cheeveresque novel, and Bethany, a 20 year old goth who's biding time waiting for something to happen with her life.
They don't talk to each other at work, but after Bethany discovers Roger's journal she starts writing him letters.
This modern take on a classic 'roman des lettres' manages to keep the plot moving well, alternating between the voices, and adding Bethany's mum, another letter writer later. Interspersed between the letters are the chapters of Roger's awful novel (imagine an American 'Abigail's party').
Enjoyable, but the ending is rushed and you feel slightly short-changed by it.