After the giddy comedy of jPod, Douglas Coupland has returned to the suburbs with his eleventh work of fiction. The Gum Thief is set in a Staples office superstore, where disparate people are thrown together. We first meet Roger, a sad-sack, forty-something divorcee who is struggling with both the composition of his first novel and his escalating reliance on alcohol. He begins to write a fictional diary of his colleague, Bethany, a teenage Goth who is bitterly coming to terms with her lack of direction. When Bethany discovers Roger’s work, she realises that his fake diary is spot on…

The novel is narrated by both Roger and Bethany, an interesting device that allows Coupland to revisit some of the attitudes in his earlier work, namely the sense of dislocation that living in the modern world brings. The angle this time, however, is age and, as with Eleanor Rigby, Coupland shows that the crises once felt by his twenty-something protagonists do not dull as time goes by. In fact, Roger’s life is a mess of complication and he frequently reminisces about his simpler past. In contrast, Bethany is only just discovering herself, and digesting her bleak future, seemingly destined to be shackled to the retail trade. These characters find companionship, eventually leading to Roger sharing passages from his novel, Glove Pond, a work so hilariously tied up in nostalgic cliché. It is a testament to Coupland’s talent that, as these three narrative strands interweave, the relationship between his two protagonists is touching and apt. In a lesser writer’s hands it could have been a creepy, worrying age-gap romance between Goth and alcoholic.

As always, among the disasters that befall his characters and the cynicism this leads to, there is a wonderful humanity pumping deep at the heart of The Gum Thief, making it a witty, erudite and highly enjoyable novel; a worthy successor to the excellent jPod.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury, £10.99) will be available from 1st October 2007.