The Interminable Present

For Douglas Coupland there is no greater muse than the present. Over the past 15 years, the Canadian writer has issued a frighteningly steady — dare we say machine-like — stream of novels, plays and essays about life in the digital age. He found his greatest success early on with books such as “Generation X” (1991) and “Microserfs” (1995), stylish experiments that suggested new ways of speaking, thinking, and writing at a time when the very nature of communication seemed to be changing daily. These, his most striking books, question whether ours is a society oriented around information, or merely around data — pure, infinite, shapeless — and scavenge for meaning in that ill-defined space in between.Mr. Coupland is an ace at describing the symptoms of our culture today — witness neologisms like Generation X and McJob — but his books have rarely risen above a state of extreme cleverness, probably because he doesn’t allow any of his ideas to marinate. It is his very fascination with technology that can make Mr. Coupland seem lightweight: his subjects will always evolve faster than his writing will allow. At its worst, his novels can feel self-conscious and gimmicky, as intriguing stories are buried beneath soon-worn references or gags that announce themselves too loudly. From its Apple-picking title to its reliance on eBay and e-mail spam — often reprinted in full — for its punch lines, Mr. Coupland’s last book, “JPod” (2006), felt like a novel in need of an expiration date.His latest, “The Gum Thief” (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $24.95) is no different. It is ostensibly about two mismatched employees of the office-supply chain Staples who stumble into an epistolary friendship. Roger is a middle-aged, divorced father of two with a far more balanced world view than one would expect from someone whose only solaces are alcohol, a dog, and writing. His audience is Bethany, a Goth 20-something who possesses all the generic angst that long ago wheezed from Roger’s once “young and fresh and dumb” self. Their relationship is restricted to letters and entries in a shared journal, and it thankfully never approaches anything sketchy. Instead they write themselves into each other’s lives, discovering a meaningful friendship that transcends age, experience, or the fact that they will never speak face-to-face. It’s an echo of the anonymous bonds enabled by a Prodigy bulletin board, an alt. books newsgroup, or a poke on Facebook (or whatever comes along to replace it).Like most Coupland characters, Roger and Bethany are well-meaning, good-natured, and far more enlightened than their vocations would suggest. As with most Coupland setups, these qualities are squandered in a disposable society: Roger, haunted by tragedies of the past, tiptoes toward a midlife crisis while Bethany, horrified by the inevitable mid-20s epiphany that life doesn’t necessarily have to get better, tries in vain to flee. This is a world where the only escape comes by accident, as when Roger and Bethany’s dim former co-worker — the thief of the title — becomes an overnight Internet celebrity thanks to YouTube.The narrative is roadblocked with company memos, Christmas cards, a series of classroom assignments written from the perspective of a slice of toast, and other writerly role-play. Embedded within Roger and Bethany’s occasionally stirring but often cloying exchanges are excerpts from a novella Roger is writing entitled “Glove Pond.” It is an exercise in awkwardness, a cover version of Edward Albee’s savage “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which one character describes as a John Cheever novel “set in hell”: A distinguished but middling older writer and his once-glamorous wife host younger, more successful versions of themselves for dinner — only they have no food or money. The novella leaps from character to character, exploring their sometimes petty, sometimes deep insecurities, and obsessing over the odd manners and awkward speech that force the evening forward. Rather than the insults and mind games of Albee’s jarring original, each character dissolves into his or her own private madness — an off-the-grid freefall the once-traumatized Roger is too numbed to adequately follow.“Glove Pond” is thoroughly absurd. But it is moving, creepily penned, and vividly rendered in a way that “The Gum Thief” is not. It evokes a sense of true dread — of anger and anxiety, floating free of spark. Something has happened to these people in order for them to go nuts, but we do not know what it is.Unfortunately the measured, mysterious tone of “Glove Pond,” which gives its characters an eerie depth, only makes the anchors of “The Gum Thief,” Roger and Bethany, seem even less interesting than their résumés suggest. Their sarcastic, chatty private writings cut through the static and fluff of the culture around them, but it’s not clear who, other than their one-dimensional coworkers, bought into it all in the first place. The problem with Mr. Coupland’s books isn’t that they require our fluency in the language of soul-numbing office mega-stores and overwrought spam from Nigeria. Nor is it his belief that there is something absurdly funny about these things. It’s that we are already up to speed with his observations: we no longer need him to point these absurdities out for us.There is certainly much to find strange about the present moment: After all, as of this writing, there exists a prime-time television sitcom about cavemen — one of them a graduate student — that was inspired by a series of car insurance ads. There are online pet cemeteries. Our “accelerated culture” — Mr. Coupland’s enchanting phrase — permits anything. But while Mr. Coupland was certainly one of the first to describe our moment’s Malaise 2.0, his books rarely lunge for a way out. Instead they seem like gestures, or vegetarian approximations of the work of fellow present-obsessives Benjamin, McLuhan or Vonnegut. If this is indeed our world refamiliarized to us, then describing it as arbitrary or gauche offers little by way of meaning. “The Gum Thief” ends abruptly, with disasters averted and a final, riotous three-page joke, the mood swinging back toward light, as though a sugar pill or a tab of Zoloft has dissolved into our bloodstream right on time.Mr. Hsu teaches English at Vassar College and writes for Slate and the New York Times.

The Interminable Present

The Interminable Present

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