So I just purchased The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. You may remember him from my previous recommendation of his last novel, jPod.

What's interesting here is the backstory I uncovered. After finishing the book in a rather brisk four hours, I went hunting for reviews of the novel. Mostly, I was just curious to see what others saw in this particular work. Anyway, I was digging through material, I discovered that Coupland is both a monotheist and an openly gay individual. And it is the later discovery that truly shocked me.

Now, please understand that I have been reading almost everything by this guy (minus a few inconsequential travelogues) since 1992. And over the course of 10ish novels, I never once would have guessed that he was gay. Certainly, issues of gaynesss arise from time to time in his novels, but they do so in the same way that anything modern eventually finds its way to the surface in his works. That's the whole point of his writing: an intense fascination with how secular modernity collides with the religious.

So I went back through his works and I jotted down a list of prominent themes in each novel: storytelling, loneliness, alientation, fascination with death, disposable nature of modern society, feelings of disconnection, changing values, changing one's station in life and lastly: how all these things relate to religion.

And that's when it hit me. Perhaps, inadvertently or otherwise, Coupland has been writing about the nature of being gay. Only, instead of giving us the standard I-love-being-gay line of PC-thinking, he's actually giving us a portrait of what it means to struggle with being gay in light of transcendent values. Wouldn't that be something? An honest portrait of the sadness that actually pervades the lives of many gay men and women.