Books & Poetry

The duke of wellingtons: Coupland prepares to hit London

Time Out: From its novel-within-a-novel (Roger’s ‘Glove Pond’) to Bethany’s creative-writing experiments (from the point of view of a piece of toast being buttered), ‘The Gum Thief’ is more interested in the frustrations and delusions of the writing process than anything you’ve written before. Did anything specific prompt this?

Douglas Coupland: No. It was more of a cumulative thing. You know that feeling you get when you walk into a store that sells well-made ‘traditional’ furniture? Sort of a, ‘Yes, but it’s not really my style’ thing? I started getting that same feeling going into book stores, and I wanted to examine some of the assumptions we have as a culture about the relationship between the novel, the avant garde and our conception of what a book is or can be.
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At the start, Roger muses that ‘nobody is forty in their heads’. Is he right?
Hmmm… I don’t want to spoil it for you for when you get there, but send me a postcard on your forty-fifth birthday.

What does getting older mean for you as a writer?
More insight and empathy.

Do you worry about losing touch? Or is it just about getting in touch with different things?
Thank you for implying that I’m in touch, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever felt. I’ve always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it’s a permanent state, and I’m still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward. But there’s always something interesting to investigate here, and it’s usually just on the periphery of our vision.

Do you recognise yourself in boilerplate descriptions of what you do/are, eg ‘godfather of Generation X’ etc?
I don’t any longer. It’s like a bar code.

Why do you dislike travel so much?
I wish I didn’t, but I burned out on travel in the 1990s and into the 2000s. And I can’t switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I’m always so zonked that I can’t appreciate it. It’s like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Madeleine McCann abduction-or-maybe-not story. It feels increasingly like something from a novel of yours…
It strikes me more as a JG Ballard sort of thing: the New Europe… the nightmare inside the dream… the whiff of conspiracy. And nothing being what it appears to be.

The staff at your fictional Staples are terrorised by an angry man they nickname Mr Rant. How much of him is there in you?
More than I’ll admit to. The only thing that instantly turns me into Mr Rant is incompetency in the travel and hotel industries. I can be a total prick and I’m pretty much unable to stop myself while being so. It kind of scares me.

I loved Bethany’s observation that when you order a beer in a London pub it’s like ‘Lord Twindlebury’s beer smorgasbord’. Are you a fan of London pubs?
Yes. It’s something we just don’t have over here, and it’s a mode of socialising that’s really missing. (That, dear reader, is the moment when Doug decided to enter the world of bartending.)

Are you scared of Google?
No. But I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere’s a research library and I can’t get an elitist kick from it any more.

Have you ever been to a fortune teller like the one Roger goes to?
No. I think you either are, or are not, the sort of person who likes that sort of thing. I’m not. It really is just a specialised form of low-grade disinhibiting hypnosis.

Has anyone ever felt good on a Sunday evening?
What a poetic question. In a weird way, no.

Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?
It’ll be something totally unanticipated: like, just before it ends, Jupiter ends first and gets all the press.

Does loneliness trigger nostalgia or vice versa?
I think both states stem from some kind of imbalance in the part of the brain that handles our perception of time – a short circuit that makes the present and future chemically intolerable.

Your blogs for the New York Times are the best I’ve read – really pithy and witty. Why do so many people get blogging so wrong?
I don’t think people get it wrong. As long as people are out there trying to generate new ways of reporting on the world, and trying to interpret the world in new ways, we’re on a good track.

In a faraway land called pre-2000, what Earthlings now call blogging was called ‘keeping a diary’. It’s hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life – instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

You’ve been working on an adaptation of your last novel, ‘JPod’, for Canadian TV. Are you pleased with how it’s going?
Yes. So far. We’ve shot 11 of 13 one-hour episodes, but post-production goes into late December.

Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel?
Ummmm… probably more Pete Shelley.

‘The Gum Thief’ is published by Bloomsbury at £10.99.