Books
Shelf life
by David Eggleton
Commodity values rule in this “lifestyle” novel.
Today’s big news is that I swiped a pack of Wrigley’s Orbit White chewing gum from the rack up front and then spent the morning chewing every piece, one by one, placing the resulting gum wads underneath the Bic Soft-Grip Display racks. Talk about life on the edge.”
Bethany, a twentysomething Goth, lives at home with her mother and works at Staples, “an internationally franchised office supply megastore” somewhere in North America. She’s looking at a lifetime of sorting pens and stacking reams of paper with the chance of promotion to supervisor of sorting and stacking, so swiping gum constitutes a kind of aggrieved response to her McJob (“low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future”). Another is keeping a diary.
But, in a twist, the diary she’s writing is actually a series of entries in the journal of another Staples employee, Roger, whom, she has discovered, is secretly writing about her. Roger and Bethany, despite shelf-stacking alongside each other, don’t communicate directly but instead via the written word. And in a further twist, Roger is also writing a novel, embedded within his journal, about two novelists – one a populist success, the other an obscure elitist.
So far, so self-conscious – The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland’s new book, is a kind of meta-novel, crammed with the author’s usual stock-in-trade of snickering in-jokes and little ironies about civilisation as we know it, where everything has been turned into a consumer experience susceptible to being summed up with a glib capsule review. Coupland, beginning with Generation X in the early 1990s, has famously positioned himself as the laureate of the quote-mark-enabled “lifestyle” novel, where commodity values rule.
The book patiently waits for you to say, I get it, with “gum” standing for daily trivia, Staples merchandise representing the raw materials of the writing enterprise, and Roger as a kind of standard-issue Everyman after the sociologists have done with him. We get a sketched-in account of his shift from “OK dad” status to “friendless alcoholic divorcee” status. He once was an aspirational writer, now he’s a cog in a big-box store, down among the “serial twelve-steppers and the terminally clueless”.
Yet, despite the blowhard venting, The Gum Thief seems frayed and jaded compared with Coupland’s last effort, JPod, partly because it’s repeating the same themes about globalisation, but in a minor key: Jpod’s computer geeks enjoy more job glamour and way more interactive group dynamics.
The Gum Thief is a sardonic exploration of Big Brother employer surveillance and happy-clappy motivational rhetoric from the point of view of those at the bottom of the totem pole. It’s about “anonymity” and “depersonalisation”, and ultimately Coupland’s characters are not so much people as a collection of morbid symptoms and clip-on behaviour patterns that in sum profess to ennoble service industry workers while also taking sideswipes at the petty politics of the writing game. It resembles a graphic novel in that the impact is all in the strip-cartoon-like incorporation of trendy “information”. As Roger itemises his workplace world of “stacks of underpriced CDs, vinyl attaché cases and software upgrade kits” and Bethany “enjoys” a package tourist experience in Europe, with everything on fast-forward, you begin to wonder if Coupland wrote this novel beneath the glow of a television screen – one showing endless repeats of The Simpsons and Seinfeld.
THE GUM THIEF, by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury, $35).
