JPod (original 2006; edition 2007)

Microserfs is one of my favourites. I started out not liking JPod because it seemed a bit cold. I didn't find Ethan, the main character, very likable. It gradually won me over, after I accepted the fact that it's quite a different book than Microserfs was -- much more of a satire.

I can see why people might not like this novel, but I think there are enough interesting thoughts about technology and culture to make it worthwhile (even if some of the insights are a little shallow). And, unexpectedly, it was pretty funny. ( )

This is the first Douglas Coupland book I've read. Maybe it wasn't the best one to start with, because it came across as self-indulgent in a way that probably wouldn't have bothered me if I'd read lots of his other books. The pages of numbers were tedious to flick through and took the book to the level of 'nerdy in the extreme'. I liked the protrayal of the JPod characters which struck me as very realistic, having worked with techy people for a few years. Much of the rest of the book was wildly and deliberately unrealistic, but no less fun for all that. ( )

"Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workres are bureaucratically marooned in Jpod, a no espcae architechtural limbon on the fringes of a massive Vancover video game design company. The six JPoders wage daily battle against the demands of a bone-headed marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan’s personal life is shaped by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijauan grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China."

Fans of Coupland will love this unofficial follow-up to Microserfs. The same reference a minute style, same use of the unreal to make the real tangible, same clever language. Coupland creates a pop-culture mash-up not just in the content of the story but the makeup of the book as the novel is not confined by strict narrative on page. The use of symbols, nonsense, emails, etc. adds a unique communication that defines the time in which the book is set. This book is probably one of the more fun titles from Coupland despite some of the artistic arrogance. Closure might not always be the end goal but it is an entertaining read. ( )

I'm a big fan of Coupland, going back to the early 1990s but this book has been one of the few gaps in the collection for me. Reading it now, I don't have any regrets about waiting so long. As previous reviews have pointed out, this book was gimmicky and self-indulgent, and came at a low point in his career. Some of the episodes were funny, some of the thoughts were deep, but come on, 25 pages of prime numbers?

''I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent the book twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." Kingsley Amis, on his son Martin's novel Money: A Suicide Note ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As I've detailed here before, I have for most of my adult life been an obsessive fan of "Generation X" phrase-coiner Douglas Coupland; but while I read literally everything from his first book up to Miss Wyoming when younger, mostly for personal reasons, and have read literally everything from The Gum Thief to now for professional reasons, there's a chunk from 2000 to 2007 that I completely missed altogether (comprising the books All Families are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby and jPod), mostly because this was when Coupland reached the low point of his transition between Postmodernism and 21st-century "Sincerism," right at a point when I myself was doing a lot more writing of books in my life than the reading of them. I mean, take 2006's jPod as a good example, which was ostensibly meant to be a "conceptual sequel" of sorts to the biggest hit of his career, 1995's Microserfs, with the two novels sharing a lot of the same premises and details; but while Microserfs was a revelatory celebration of a coming geek entrepreneurial class just starting to show itself, jPod is an unimaginative reaction to our Web 2.0 times, with Coupland seemingly out of ideas about what to do with his old pop-culture shtick and quirky Aspie characters besides to ramp things up to an unsatisfyingly cartoonish level, but not yet understanding what he needed to do to change his career path into its next higher level. Eventually, of course, he did end up realizing what to do, which in a nutshell was to make his stories a lot weirder and darker (see Generation A and Player One, for example); but here where he was still floundering with it all, jPod feels very much like a Coupland simply waiting with boredom for the high-profile MTV shorts offer that were guaranteed to come with any early-2000s project of his (and indeed, jPod itself got made into a 13-episode show for Canadian television, with a novel that feels very much like a quickly done afterthought to that show instead of the other way around). As big a fan as I am of his, it's admittedly hard to justify this particular stretch of his career, so best perhaps to turn either to the books older than these or newer to save yourself some wasted reading experiences.

Out of 10: N/A ( )