Douglas Coupland jumps the shark.

I wanted to like this book, but as with most of Coupland's work these days, it just seemed needlessly convoluted and gimmicky, and was populated with a host of thoroughly unlikable characters. Most everything he writes is the sort of thing that you'd find to be brilliant if you were in your early twenties and looking forward to a life of exciting employment in the gaming/software industry--but anyone who's been around the block in that world a few times would find it to be sophomoric at best, I think. I know, I know, it's supposed to be a wackytime parody--but if so it's a fairly tedious one.

I was hoping for a return to the good old days of  Microserfs but all this read did was lead me to wonder if Microserfs was as good as I imagined it to be at the time (when I was, er, 24, and looking forward to a life of exciting employment in the software industry).

It’s been nearly six months. More than 50 books, page after page of perfectly fine books, good books even, but with nothing enthusing me enough to get that totally arbitrary 5 star feeling! Oh the joy of being 12 pages into this and knowing I loved it!

Yes, I could have taken a bit of a meatier ending (if I was being a real pedant about it) but the fact I enjoyed pretty much every page of this and laughed aloud on more than one occasion (most of it turtle-related) just felt super nice…. and Coupland making himself an utter cock in this was really fun rather than painfully meta, which is so often the case.

I used to love love love Coupland, back when I was a self-involved early-20s douchebag. Now that I am a self-involved early-30s douchebag, I don't think I do?

I've put off reading this for years due to the career-low title of 'JPod' (urgh), and I was correct to do so, though maybe if I read it at the time, I might have enjoyed it? Anyway, saw this for 20p in a charity shop, so how could I say no?

The plot: some dicks do some 'zany' things involving the 'zeitgeist' and gamer culture. The 'plot' moves whimisically along, banal observations are made, the book ends.

Coupland inserts himself as a character, and while this initially grates, I came to like him more than the other people in it, as he seemed aware of how shitty they were.

There's pages and pages of things like pi to loads of decimal places, etc, and I'm just glad I'm on medication for my OCD or I would have had to read them.

Christ, this stuff's a lot more palatable when it's Bret Easton Ellis and the characters are more endearingly loathsome.

I feel old, but not as old as I perhaps need to be to recognise and enjoy and empathise with the banal indie-movie Braffian shits in this book.

I'm a little conflicted over my reaction to this novel. Because it was an undeniably enjoyable read and there was literally not a chapter which didn't make me laugh out loud. And yet, I feel... underwhelmed.

I feel I should preface this review by saying, Coupland is my favourite author. Like, by a really long way. I love all his books insanely much. (Well, except Shampoo Planet. No one loves Shampoo Planet. Except Ryan Ross, apparently.) I want to write like him. I would happily only ever read Coupland-esque books, if enough existed.

That said, what I admire most about his writing is how he has matured. Because I am not one of those people who falls over themselves at how AWESOME Generation X is. It's not. It's a jumping off point -- and the depth, the humanity Coupland has put into his novels in the past 15 years make it look... paltry. Eleanor Rigby completely, completely blew me away. I was expecting to hate it, but its beauty is so understated and genuinely poignant. Seriously: wow.

Which is why I was hesitant when I read the description of jPod. It sounded like Microserfs updated and remixed with All Families Are Psychotic. Which it basically is. And don't get me wrong, it's quite a feat to be as successfully zeitgeisty and funny as a Microserfs update calls for. But compared to Eleanor Rigby? Feels undeniably like a step backwards.

It was also the first Coupland (barring Shampoo Planet :P) that felt repetitive to me. I've met Ethan before. (In fact, it just took me 30 seconds to remember his name, he's so familiar... as Richard, as Dan.) The romance between Ethan and Kaitlin, in particular, I barely felt like I had to concentrate on, because I knew exactly what was going to happen. Neurotic Boy + Quirky Girl = Cute, Functional Relationship. It's not a bad trope, but it's still a trope (Garden State, anyone?). It's also extremely familiar in the Coupland universe.

Confession time: Coupland novels tend to make me cry. Really a lot. Girlfriend In A Coma is the worst, but Microserfs also makes me sob. jPod, even though it rationalized this, felt emotionally void. I wasn't left with any kind of strong emotional connection to any of the characters. And frankly, the warm characterization is what has always separared Coupland from the Bret Easton Ellises of the writing world. (I can't abide Bret Easton Ellis. He's an extraordinarily talented writer. Hate his books.)

I took a Contemporary Literature class a couple of years ago and my very smart lecturer was talking, in passing, about Coupland and said that he was the kind of author to write himself into his books. My reaction was, pffft! bitch, please. But I guess she was right; I was wrong. :/ Although metafiction is a pet peeve of mine, I really don't mind it when it's done in the right measure with the right amount of irony. jPod certainly wasn't Philip Roth's Operation Shylock (which I felt fell headfirst into its own wankery), and Coupland-as-a-Machiavellian-tycoon certainly made me laugh a lot. Still, it makes me twitch a little.

I feel like this is the book a lot of people (the people who think Generation X is AWESOME and never bothered to read much else of his work) have been expecting from Coupland. The book that's smarter-than-thou and wittily postmodern. And to his credit, he wrote it on his own terms and made it very funny. I just hope he gets back to writing with the heart of Girlfriend In A Coma and Eleanor Rigby in future.

I can't tell if this book was good or not. It's similarity to microserfs can't help but draw the comparison so here it goes:

Microserfs has a clear theme, the ways technology can enhance interpersonal relationships, and it builds on that theme through the course of the novel. Jpod however is stuck in a self-referencing absurdist loop. All the characters have exactly one personality trait, and in the latter half of the book the author seems to be arguing that the cause of that is various forms of "high functioning autism". Where Microserfs was funny and endearing, Jpod is devoid of anything but the most morbid humour. Nothing about JPod ties it to a specific time or place. Reading JPod made me feel like one of the people in JPod(or Kaitlin near the start of the book): Endlessly wasting my time with nonsense games which win me worthless prizes.

But maybe thats the point? which is kind of a cop out answer. But I felt angry, bored, and so sick of the book that I ended up finding parts kind of funny even when they really weren't. Which is sort of what happens to the characters in the book. So in that way JPod was kind of good. It's good in a removed sort of way.

This is the first Coupland I'd read since "Shampoo Planet." He still has that knack of depicting the wacky denizens of modern computer culture, in this case the staff of a video game software firm, with humor and verve, but I found some of the typographical gimmicks of the book a bit too precious

This book alternated between being kind of funny and satirical and maddeningly self indulgent, masturbatory garbage. Anytime a writer puts himself in a story you know it’s in trouble but what was most annoying beyond the aimless plot and too frequent pop culture references (luckily only about 0.5 Ernest Cline) was the smug Meta inserts of random phrases in different type sets, emails, interviews, or the 60 pages of pi numbers. I get that he was making a point about the characters lives, but to waste so much paper and space on nothing was pretentious. You get the same idea through the story. This was just overkill. But on the plus side it made the book go by faster since probably 150-200 pages of the 500 was hardly used. I’d call this book a disappointment but I had no expectations so it was more meh than anything.

I read this 2006 novel shortly after 1995's Microserfs. Not a good idea. This was a reboot with the author trying too hard to out-do the original. The many lists are long and tedious and add little to nothing to the narrative. End up skipping. Mother and father character too outrageous to believe. Not as humourous as author hoped. I'm sure it appeals to some but I should not have taken this second helping of what I don't really like.

funny as hell. i laughed my arse reading this.. hohoohho. this is so relevant to everyone working with technology today.

(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

it was OK