WHEN I GOOGLED DOUGLAS Coupland before meeting him, the first result that came up – out of 1,230,000 – was a quote by Coupland about journalists Googling their interview subjects before meeting them.

“PreGoogle, a writer preparing for an interview had to do genuine research involving paper, libraries, legwork and some dimension of vim,” went the quote. “These days, one merely Googles and goes to the 137th page of results to give the illusion of in-depth investigation.”

After reading this, I closed my browser and sat there for a while in my hotel room, not quite knowing what to do. Then I decided to go about my research in a more grown-up, more diligent way: I YouTubed him.

Coupland, of course, is one of the few authors with a YouTube history to match his Google hits. It has been 15 years since he first went on MTV to read aloud passages from Generation X, his zillion-selling novel about target marketing and overeducated underachievers that was, as you might expect, target marketed at overeducated underachievers. As well as the humdrum feat of defining a generation, Generation Xalso introduced the term “McJob” into the English language: it can now be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, much to the chagrin of a certain global restaurant franchise with a mascot who answers to the name of Ronald.

Coupland is a writer so fixated on the future that he sorts modern history into periods related to the invention of key technological products – preGoogle, postsatellite, and so on – in much the same way as you might sort Japanese history by emperor. During the 1990s he combined such affectations with an image that seemed to be modelled on Max Headroom. (I remember seeing him on Channel 4 as a talking head against a white static background, making the kind of comments that you might expect from Oscar Wilde if he had been cryogenically unfrozen and sent to work at the Microsoft campus.) The novelty hasn’t worn off: since Generation X in 1991 Coupland has managed to turn out at least one book a year, most of them defiantly antiliterary, employing simplistic devices such as: Question: What does Coupland look like these days? Answer: Older than you would think.

Perhaps it was just the venue of our meeting (the fireside-and-brandy restaurant of the absurdly plush Wedgewood Hotel in Vancouver) but Coupland looked almost . . . professorial. The grey beard seemed to accentuate his receding hairline, and he wore a Sunday golfer’s blue sweater over a blue polo shirt.

Coupland is only 46, but he appears to be ageing on time-lapse video. He’s deaf, also. “We were in a plane up north and we hit some kind of pressurisation thing,” he told me, delicately. “At the time it felt like a crown had broken. After a six-week thing with tinnitus and whooshing noises, I had lost 40 per cent in this ear.” He is also unable to “focus” noises, meaning he has no sense of the direction from which a sound is coming. “Sometimes I just feel like Rain Man, I tell ya,” he sighed.

To judge by Coupland’s latest book, The Gum Thief, all this ageing is doing him no end of good. Set in an outlet of Staples (the B&Q of stationery) – aisles 2-North and 2-South, to be specific, home of the sheet protectors, indexes & dividers, notebooks, Postit products, paper pads, specialty papers and “social stationery” – the novel is populated by a familiar cast of service-economy losers. It will be familiar not only to anyone who read Coupland’s Microserfs (1994), but also to fans of all those other seemingly Coupland-inspired tales of punch-clock existentialism, including Ricky Gervais’s sitcom The Office (Coupland is now working on his own TV series, based on last year’s novel jPod).

The story of The Gum Thief is told through diary entries and notes passed between two Staples employees, who have pledged never to talk to each other in person. It’s a clever device (the cleverness becomes clearer as you read) and funny; genuinely, embarrass-yourself-on-a-plane funny. The antihero, Roger, is composing an awful novella entitled Glove Pond, which is posted in instalments throughout the narrative. It’s a bold move, asking the reader to suffer through Glove Pond, but it works, and through Glove Pond’s villain (a famous novelist) we are treated to put-downs of Salinger (“a one-trick pony almost pitifully dependent on telephones for his plot lines”) and Nabokov (“the masturbatory rantings of a deviant perpetuating his unclean, lustful ideas”). All of which sounds very, well, literary, doesn’t it?

Not according to Coupland: he insists that he hasn’t gone all grown-up writer on us.

“The more that time goes on, the more I realise that my connections are more with the visual world than the literary world,” he tells me, unconvincingly. “Literature ended in 1910.” Coupland does, indeed, have a thriving career in the visual arts – one of his recent works is a series of hornets’ nests made from chewed-up copies of his books – but he is also prone to cool-sounding declarations that don’t bear much scrutiny, and which are typically used as entertaining diversions from a question he doesn’t have much interest in answering.

During our conversation, he offers such passing fancies as: “There is really way too much truth out there”; “Did you know that today is International Speak-Like-A-Pirate-Day?”; and “Four days in New York is my max: it doesn’t matter who you’re visiting, they all basically live in the same apartment.” Indeed, it’s hard to keep Coupland on-topic for longer than a couple of sentences. Even then, things can go wrong. “I’m good at anticipating the things that are going to fuck up,” he announces, promisingly, towards the end of the interview, before adding: “The thing that really upsets me is incompetence, where competence is definitely called for. Hotels are No 1.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Coupland’s work is not just that it has stood up over the years, but that it seems to have become even more relevant. His chapter titles in Generation X (always printed in capital letters), for example, could have been written yesterday: “SHOPPING IS NOT CREATING”, “PURCHASED EXPERIENCES DON’T COUNT”, “THE SUN IS YOUR ENEMY”. There is perhaps only one other author whose obsession with the contemporary has managed to sound so unembarrassing more than a decade later and that is Kurt Vonnegut. In fact, with its references to landfills, depression, and Drano (a caustic drain-cleaning product often swallowed by Vonnegut’s suicidal characters), The Gum Thief sometimes reads like a more cleverly executed version of Breakfast of Champions. Coupland, however, isn’t prone to Vonnegut’s bouts of misanthropy. “I’m not sure the present is really as bad as people make it out to be,” he says.

Coupland doesn’t talk much about his family. We know this, however: he was born on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Baden-Sollingen, West Germany, before the Couplands moved to Vancouver, where they have remained. Both of his parents are still alive, and his father, 81, is still a practising GP. “We were a real guns-and-ammo family,” he says. “In our house, where there wasn’t a gun, there was a picture of a jet. When my dad comes over and looks at where I live now [in a house designed by the modernist architect Ron Thom] he says: ‘The only thing I recognise as a “thing” is your TV set’.” Coupland has a policy of not discussing his three brothers, although he mentions, by the by, that one of them is a taxidermist. “When a trumpeter swan flies into a telegraph pole out in the Northwest Territories, he’s the one who brings it back to life,” he says, dead-pan. “He’s got a whole Jeffrey Dahmer thing going on.” (Dahmer was the serial killer who dismembered and ate his victims.) But why, of all the places in the world he could live, choose the relative obscurity of Vancouver? “I like the fact there’s no past here,” he says. “The only direction you can go is forwards. Look around you [he points to the lobby of the hotel], this is all faux.” In his poorly received novel Girlfriend in a Coma (1996) – the title borrowed from the song by the Smiths – Coupland expands on this theme. “I want to know what 2088 looks like – or 2000088, for that matter. And what will eventually happen to a pair of Nordica ski boots I threw out in 1982. Will they fossilise? Will they become petrified? Will they remain mummified in a landfill until the Sun goes supernova?”

But is all this future obsession – rather like Coupland’s claim to be antiliterary – just part of his hyper-successful brand management? Or is Coupland becoming more human, less cartoon, as he grows older?

All his books have had a kind of sadness to them: a sense of utter bafflement at the onslaught of technology and mass culture, coupled with a suspicion that our parents had it much better. And with The Gum Thief the sadness is more palpable than ever. “I’m old enough now to know what’s been lost,” he says. “The freedom that you had in the 1970s, when you could go hitchhiking everywhere, when you didn’t worry about getting on a plane. There was an absence of fear that I do miss. Or maybe I was just lucky to grow up in one of the nicest little bubbles in all of history.”

In case you were wondering, by the way, there is no 137th page to the 1,230,000 Google results on Coupland. They max out at the 85th page, with the following message: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 848 already displayed.” That’s the thing with technology: the enormous promise, and then the reality, which can be so . . . so underwhelming.

The Weird World of Douglas Coupland

You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied. from GENERATION X (1991)

I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere – sproing! – with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You’d think we’d give the issue a little more thought than we do. from LIFE AFTER GOD (1994)

You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. from jPOD (2006)

AND IN REAL LIFE . . . Coupland has made hornet nests out of his books. “I took copies . . . and began pulping them myself, chew by chew, a slow, laborious process. Have you ever chewed a book? I doubt it. The first thing you need to know is that doing so really trashes your saliva ducts, and it takes about a week to get through one average-size book. The second thing to remember is to drink lots of water and spit regularly or your teeth will turn grey. Usually I’d chew while watching Law & Order.”

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury, £10.99; 288pp

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