How soon is now?

Douglas Coupland squints across a table in the Clarence Hotel residents’ lounge. Cradled in his hands is the deluxe limited edition of his latest novel The Gum Thief, a sparky little intergenerational-metatextual number set in an office supplies store.

“Did you read it?” he says, sipping coffee by way of an antidote to crippling jet lag.
I reply in the affirmative.
“Okay, good,” he replies, mollified. “I just flat out ask reporters now, ‘Did you read it?’ and if they hesitate for a second, it’s like, ‘You didn’t, did you? Why are you even here?!’”
In fairness, the above exchange was conducted with more than a modicum of good humour. All the same, I feel compelled to cite the book’s defining line by way of proof: “I sometimes get the feeling that we’re having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell – all of it one great big condom-free involuntary love-in.”
This is perhaps the quintessential Coupland zinger. The 45-year-old author, who looks a lot like a slimmer Philip K Dick and mumbles like Benicio Del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects, writes books that inhabit the stuck-on-fast-forward zone between modernism and futurism. Aptly enough, he says the only other writer he knows in his native Vancouver is William Gibson, with whom he shares a love of all things Tokyonian. And like Gibson, whose future shocks have of late ceded to a more De Lillo-esque take on the shadowy, speculative present, he is very much a writer fixated with what’s happening right now.
Coupland’s prose evokes a central paradox of journalism: the stuff written with one eye on posterity tends to die on the page, while the stuff written quickly, with no other purpose than to document the present moment, seems to endure. He has more in common with zeitgeisty bloggers and magazine columnists than literary fictionalists, and is neither sentimental nor traditionalist about writing, possibly because his background is in physics, sculpture and the visual arts (a major influence on the groundbreaking graphics of his epoch-defining debut Generation X, published in 1991).
So was it always on the cards that he would bypass historical context in favour of documenting the ever-present Now?
“Oh god, yeah, ask anyone I went to kindergarten with,” he laughs. “I didn’t enter writing through any of the traditional doorways. In art college, in the visual arts culture, there’s various branches of the tree, there’s text art, which was a sort of ’70s thing, and I looked at words, logos like Sony or whatever, saw there was a shape or an object first, and stringing them together was more of an optical phenomenon than a literary thing for me: the words have to look good on the page. It was like learning how to speak English all over again.
“I was able to work with the computer system,” he continues, “so I never had to study Shakespeare, or anyone who is basically dead. And it was great! I can’t imagine reading anything prior to the 20th century. I’ve tried and it just doesn’t happen for me. The only place in written culture I’ve ever been able to locate any sense of progress or motion forward or any indication of wanting to do something new with the language has been in advertising, computing, technology or film and TV.”
Heretical words in certain literary circles, one imagines.
“I remember in University in Vancouver, the head of the English Department was like, ‘Oh, you like modernism?’” Coupland recalls. “And in my head I couldn’t believe that somebody in an English department was actually expressing interest in something new, and I was like, ‘Yes, totally!’ And he said, ‘I love Yeats too!’ And I had this weird horror moment where it was like Finnegan’s Wake was a Damien Hirst shark in a tank, and after that there’s never been a book written. And I just thought, ‘Oh god, poor language’. I don’t think I could or would do a historical novel. Everything I do seems to be about going forward.”
Here’s another Gibsonian theme applicable to Coupland’s experience of the educational apparatus: 1970s and ’80s Career Guidance Counsellors never foresaw that the geeks would inherit the earth, that invisible legions of socially inept loners gorged on science fiction comics and arcade games would eventually assume a sort of secret supremacy and make a fortune in the information technology and entertainment industries.
“Sort of like some sort of Darwinian niche opened up.”
Exactly. It wasn’t about being the biggest, the strongest or the most socially adept anymore, but about how you could turn invention into currency.
“Focusing on a very specific way of dealing with language and imagination. I agree completely.”
It’s hardly surprising then that the godhead of those nerdy dreamers, Steven Spielberg, picked Coupland’s brains about the futurological landscapes of films like AI and Minority Report. Being charitable, we might suggest all those Gap and Starbucks logos in the movie adaption of Dick’s short story had as much to do with Coupland’s branding preoccupations as the movie company’s product placement deals. Most of his novels are written in a zippy, talky, user-friendly style that co-opts and subverts the snappy catchphraseology of advertising copywriters, often coining devilishly viral buzzwords – Generation X, McJobs, Microserfs – that seem to enter the vernacular overnight.
“It’s not something I set out to do,” Coupland says. “It’s kind of like you were talking about before, the things you think are really going to last forever are just like, meeeh, and the things you think are, not throwaway, but certainly much less mediated by your worries or short term concerns, those are gonna be the best things.
“I used to speak technically okay Japanese and then moved away and came back 20 years later and was much more cavalier about the way I spoke, and it was so much better, it was intuitive, it wasn’t constipated, there was a looseness to it that really worked. I’d always wanted to work in Japanese media, not as a writer but as a designer, because our neighbours were Japanese and had these magazines and I decided this was where I wanted to be. So during art school I went over and got a degree in Japanese business science.
“I was exposed to so many different options and ways of presenting information and ideas. We all see signs and t-shirts the Japanese get wrong through translation, and sometimes through mutation or error amazing things emerge, not unlike biology. Like these t-shirts in China that say, ‘Let’s Democracy!’ There are still some rules, but basically what’s a noun, what’s a verb, what’s an adjective, possessive case, all these things? There’s this new logic. It’s not like cut-and-paste or something with Burroughs, but you really can create new forms.”
Mutate and survive, in other words. The Gum Thief, like many of Coupland’s books, turns an anthropologist’s eye on the human species, and is also infused with the same end-of-the-world dread that provided such an unexpected deus ex machina in the last act of Girlfriend In A Coma.
Like early JG Ballard (the English writer he admires most), Coupland seems to run gleefully into the open arms of the apocalypse. If the big one drops, one imagines he’ll watch the event unfold with the clinical gaze of a pathologist. Except in Coupland’s universe it won’t be a purple-prosed, blood-red Revelation, but a mundane, fluorescent-lit apocalypse. When did this preoccupation with a very suburban kind of armageddon begin?
“I think there’s a predisposition, just ’cos I was from a military family growing up,” he says, “and every wall was covered with guns or photographs of jets or implements of death or war or whatever. And I had three brothers, and my mother was desperate for time by herself, so on Sundays my dad would go to the hospital and do his rounds, and he locked me and my brothers in the skeleton room with the X-Rays. And so, in a lot of the books, Lionsgate Hospital, where my dad works, is used.
“And then in 1971, I would have been nine, there was a really ugly disgusting oil spill near the school in my district and we were called out of school to go down and help. It was a complete ecological fuck-up, you were finding dead birds coated in oil – it was just awful. That was before corporations had to be accountable for what they did; I don’t even think we know. And then the Cold War was heating up: the ’70s were just this dark age.”
Does he remember those horrific ’80s nuclear holocaust docu-dramas like Threads and The Day After?
“Threads fucked me up so badly. It was in Sheffield and the ending… oh god, that was awful. I do ask people younger than myself, ‘Don’t you ever think about nuclear (meltdown)?’ and they’re like, ‘Nuclear what? Why would I worry about that?’ (But for me) it’s always just under the surface. I was in Toronto for SARS, and it was so exciting. I was at the Four Seasons downtown, and the North American oncological society, in an act of craven cowardice, pulled out, and I was like the only non-medical person at the hotel, so they shut down all the elevators but one, and no one would go out in public, and I was like, ‘Yes! It’s finally happening!’ I was just so happy to be there for it! I mean, someday, who knows when, there’ll be one weird little thing, there’ll be a domino effect and everything stops.”

The Gum Thief is published by Bloomsbury