Mostly Harmless

Douglas Coupland - The Gun Thief

Bethany and Roger begin a bizarre and lovely Staples relationship when Bethany finds that he’s been impersonating her in his journal. Bethany write him back, and thus begins The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland’s epistolary novel about living a life that didn’t go exactly the way you planned. Bethany is a twentysomething goth, Roger a mid-40s alcoholic divorcee. Roger is working on a novel, Glove Pond and we get excerpts from it interspersed throughout the book, and inside Glove Pond, one of the characters, Kyle, is writing a book set in a Staples. It’s all very self-referential and lovely.

In addition to letters from Bethany and Roger, we also get a few letters by ancillary characters: Bethany’s mom, Roger’s ex-wife, co-workers who witnessed the events at Staples. It allows us to see other people’s perspectives of the same events. The book is really quite subtle and funny. I found the relationship that grew between Bethany and Roger really quite touching, and the book within a book within a book made my head hurt a bit. Unlike jPod and some of his other books, Coupland refrained from pages of three letter scrabble words and those sorts of things. Instead, we get a series of essays about what it’s like to be the slice of bread being buttered.

I flew through this book, and enjoyed it a lot. I think my favourite Coupland book is Hey Nostradamus!, which I haven’t reviewed on this blog yet, but I may make time to do eventually. I bought two more of his books on the weekend and will get to them eventually as well.