The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Modern, Adult, Humour, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780753180969
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bethany

Roger,

You’ve missed five days at work now. Why are you skipping work so much? Are you sick? I feel ridiculous leaving correspondence in your basement suite’s mail slot, but I’ve got no intention of knocking on your door. Leaving you this note is the extent of my act of reaching out to you.

My theory is that you’re not sick at all. I think you’re sitting inside your place, getting hosed and cursing the universe, probably because you’re mad at your ex-wife and her lawyer.

I think you’re going through a bad patch, but I also think you’ll be out of it soon, so I’m going to write this and stick it through your door and then not worry about you any more. You’re certainly not missing anything at work, but I did this one freaky thing you might find interesting—and of possible use to you as a novelist.

After going to visit Kyle’s grandmother’s grave, I got to thinking about death more than usual, and I figure that someday you’ll write the words THE END and Glove Pond will be finished. That’s got to be sort of like death, don’t you think? And unlike real life, in a book, you know exactly when the end is going to happen.

And because you know when the end is coming, you’ll maybe feel some sort of pressure near the end, like, Holy shit! This puppy’s going to be finished in maybe five pages! No three pages! Augh! The end is near! The end is near!

And so here’s my idea: I figure that the mental pressure of smashing into a book’s end must squeeze something out of a writer. It must force them to cough up some sort of essential truth, because it’s now or never.

With this in mind, I took the bus to the library and went into the fiction section and got a cart and chose a hundred novels at random from the shelves: potboilers, Nobel Prize winners, sci-fi, romance—everything. And I had a pile of coins and I went and photocopied the last two pages of each book and then I went to a coffee shop and read those hundred last pages looking for a common theme, and you know what? I found one. It’s not in every book, but it’s in most books. It’s this: when a book ends, the characters are often moving either towards or away from a source of light— literally—like carrying a candle into a dark room or running a red light at an intersection or opening curtains or falling into a well or—this list goes on. I circled all the bits about light, and there’s no mistaking it.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Hope to see you soon, Roger.

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