By Douglas Coupland. Random House Canada, 275 pp, $32, hardcover

When you think about it, there are few places lonelier than your average big-box store. Any Staples you care to choose lacks humanity at just about every level. So it's no wonder that Douglas Coupland–poet of loneliness (he named a novel Eleanor Rigby, after all)–has set his latest book, The Gum Thief, in precisely that locale.

What makes The Gum Thief so forlorn is that its characters never actually interact. Told from multiple perspectives, the story advances through diary entries, FedExed letters, and e-mail. In this way, the principal Staplers–among them, hurtin' middle-aged Roger with his disappointments and grief, and hurtin' young Bethany with her goth makeup masking insecurity and despair–reach out for connection though physically apart. To boot, their travails are mirrored in a novel within the novel, a self-consciously John Cheever–ish tale of suburban disaffection. Ah, postmodernity.

This makes it sound dismal, but The Gum Thief is both hilarious and clever. Coupland's zingers fly freely, particularly toward the sitting duck that is Staples. Bethany dumps on her workplace: "Setting up fresh little sheets of white paper for people to use to test magic markers is not a hope scenario. All people ever draw is squiggles.”¦Staples must die." (Though the work scenes are grimly funny, Coupland seems to have no real sense of how people actually pass eight hours a day doing retail.) And his observations remain acute; no one can philosophize on the mundane like Coupland. Bethany's fictional alter ego perceives the commonality of all existence: "Brittany thought of her own DNA and the DNA of all the creatures surrounding her–quintillions of cells, all of them loaded with DNA, and all of that spiral DNA rotating as mechanically and passionlessly as a car's odometer. Suddenly, she felt surrounded by billions of little odometers, a universe of churning and grinding and drilling and digging."

Similar perceptions spike every chapter (and every chapter within a chapter). Only connect, the characters suggest. Seize the day. They're shopworn sentiments, perhaps, but made shiny and new under Coupland's fluorescent talent.