 |
 Douglas Coupland in Vancouver, September 2007. (D.J. Weir) |
TORONTO - "Facebook," replies Douglas Coupland, sandwiched between a pair of walnut-trim bookcases inside his Canadian publisher's head office, "what's that?"
Since the early '90s, the Vancouver-based author has been the harbinger of cool, magnifying comedic Gen-Xers trying to make meaningful lives amidst hokey pop culture catchphrases and diminished McJob career prospects. But on a drizzly afternoon in Toronto, the greying pen behind the gadget whackery in last year's Giller-nominated "Jpod" seems puzzled.
A place where he can meet up with old high-school people, he ponders. "No thanks; like I need a new addiction."
He does love YouTube, though. The online video phenomenon makes a cameo in his new book, "The Gum Thief," and Coupland narrates a series of short videos promoting the book on the site. "Boy YouTube just came out of nowhere didn't it?" says Coupland, sipping a cup of coffee. "We couldn't have had this conversation last year could we?
"I always look up things I remember from the distant past to see if I remember them correctly," he adds. "For example, in the early '80s the American coffee blenders association or something had this campaign called, 'Are you a coffee achiever?' YouTube it - 'coffee achiever.' It's David Bowie, Kurt Vonnegut, Cicely Tyson and Jane Curtain drinking coffee and saying, 'Coffee helps us achieve.'
"It's so random, but that's what you use YouTube for."
|
Averaging one new book every 18 months since his 1991 breakout, "Generation X," his 17th novel plunks the act of writing in the spotlight. Scrapping his penchant for first-person narratives, "The Gum Thief" is told through a patchwork of letters and the crushingly bleak book-within-a-book, "Glove Pond."
Lost amidst bond paper and Sharpies, swollen 40-something, Roger daydreams through a job he hates at Staples. Fueled by booze and saddled with a sleigh full of emotional baggage - a wife who has left him, a son that's dead and a future promising nothing but diminished returns - when the curtain opens, Roger's journal is stumbled upon by one of his colleagues, Bethany.
Intrigued by his nihilistic ruminations and puzzled by an entry that's apparently about her, she adds a commentary of her own. And as the two embark on an epistolary relationship, Bethany convinces Roger to resurrect "Glove Pond" - the long simmering novel he's been putting off writing for years.
"Glove Pond,' FYI, is the world's worst novel," Coupland clarifies. "To lend nobility to his own life, Roger's writing this book and the book is called 'Glove Pond' and the reason it's called 'Glove Pond' is somehow, I don't know if it was in Grade 3, somehow I got it in my head that that was the title of a book by Virginia Woolf or Dylan Thomas. So when it came time to write about Roger and his book, I remembered, 'Glove Pond.'"
With long excerpts plumped between extracts from Roger's journal and letters between Roger, Bethany and others, Coupland veers from hilariously camp riffs on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to incredibly penetrating snapshots of people at the end of their rope.
"I like situations where you find hope in places you didn't think there was going to be hope," he says. "We've all been to Staples I don't know how many times and it struck me one day, 'Man, this is the most boring place on the planet.' And yet, there are people there and they must have interior lives, so there has to be something going on beneath the surface."
Treading familiar ground in "Jpod" (he first wrote about techies in 1995's prescient "Microserfs"), Coupland says part of the challenge with "The Gum Thief" was to take a stab at something he figured was story proof.
"It couldn't have been Home Depot," he says, pausing midstream to examine the tape recorder in front of him. "It had to be in a place so intrinsically sterile. I wanted to find a way of giving life and hope to these people who are basically, 'I'm in charge of pens, markers, stationary, envelopes and protractors.'"
Mastering this challenge in a cinch, Coupland has set a new goal for himself…sort of. Starting in January, CBC will begin airing a television adaptation of "Jpod."
Now lensing in Vancouver, he says the filmed version has a pretty high degree of fidelity to the book. "It's TV; I hope it does well," he shrugs. "Then again, it's TV, so it could get killed tomorrow. I have no illusions about it."
He is sure of one thing though - Allan Thicke. One of the shows stars, Coupland promises audiences will fall in love with the '80s sitcom dad all over again. "It's his 'Pulp Fiction,'" he gushes. "We have him doing so much crazy s----, it's great. He's such a sport."
Still, it won't be long before he gets back to writing. "It's hard when you write, 'The End,' 'because you're in love with your characters and now they're gone forever. Then one day, it's usually when I'm driving a car and I come to a stop light, my idea for the next book arrives.
"And then I spend the next year and a quarter detangling that moment."
"The Gum Thief" is in stores now.