This book spoke to me. :)

I enjoyed this book as I usually enjoy most of Coupland's stuff. But what I really liked are the nonlinear parts of this book that are almost visual art in disguise, especially three rant-ish blocks of Kerouacian flow, in which Coupland nails some dark truths about being alive today and how much the online world influences our individual and collective psyches. I like how he is not just critical of the world surrounding Gen X and Millennial people (like he was in Generation X), but of these generations themselves. We are complicit in our own misery and shortcomings. If we live in a culture, we contribute to the culture for all its ills.
I always feel like I learn something from Coupland's writing, but in a good way rather than your standard academic pedagogical approach. Coupland says the things others are scared or too PC to. He also has a sense of humor coupled with a deep cynicism. Storywise, it seems like he is stuck a bit in a narrative loop and his characters are almost interchangable in all his books/stories. But again what set this book apart is the linear story being made jagged by the inclusion of (it's hard to describe) Coupland's visual sense and the nonlinear pages, which compose a good 20% of the overall book. Pages of HTML code, concepts written in an Asian character-driven language, pages with almost nothing on them but for some little absurd thing, etc. He is showing how the computer and internet are deeply effecting our experience of reality and how our minds think and process the world.

Sharp and wacky, just like me!

A hilarious book centred on Ethan, a programmer with JPod, a subsection of a gaming company, his colleagues and his parents. It starts as it means to go on, with his mum asking for Ethan's help with dealing with the body of a man she has accidentally electrocuted in her basement as she was intimidating him for not paying for the weed,which she grows in the house, she'd supplied him. Ethan finds himself getting into many situations like this, with her and his dad, who is a failed actor just dreaming of getting a speaking role and his new boss, Steve, who after trying to change the skateboarding game they've been working on to include an idiotic turtle character, is disappeared by Kam Fong, an acquaintance of Ethan and his family who is known for people smuggling. Ethan then goes to find him in China where he has become addicted to heroin, and on the plane meets Douglas Coupland himself, in a breaking of the fourth wall I've never come across before. Coupland manages to ingratiate himself more and more into Ethan's life by inviting his colleagues, his girlfriend and his parents to become partners in his new business, which they all have to be quiet about because they've signed NDAs, but eventually, at the end, Ethan is permitted entry to the business too, and finds himself perfectly happy for once in his life. He complains that stories always end when the characters are happy because happiness is perceived as boring. My first book by Coupland and I very much enjoyed it - will definitely seek out others of his. The story is interspersed with various lists and jokes and snippits of code, which seem funnier because I've started learning Python for work.

I don't know what anyone expects from Douglas Coupland these days, much less what I expect from the man. I've read everything he's published since Generation X...sometimes I love it, sometimes I loathe it, sometimes I'm just bored.

But this one made me laugh. A lot. And he brings back his plugged-in sense of playful narrative, though I wondered at times if he was sneaking in an imitation of Dave Eggars doing an imitation of Douglas Coupland. If that makes sense.

Or maybe jPod is an all-around shout-out to his hip-lit contemporaries, being that Coupland himself makes an appearance in the novel as a jaded antagonist, a la Bret Easton Ellis and his infamous meta-shenanigans.

Doesn't matter. I laughed. I turned pages with great pleasure. I'll read it again and most likely laugh just as much. Definitely his best attempt in years.

I really like the TV show they made of this book so I was excited to read my first Coupland novel. The story is slightly different than the show, but mostly the same with more story revealed and a different ending. It's good, not incredible, with a lot of weird postmodern quirks that didn't really work. I'll read another Coupland eventually, probably it'll be better.

Awesome! This is my first Coupland book - am anxious to read more.

JPod follows the lives of five young co-workers at a large video game design company - working in a soul-less, mindless...but funky...corporate environment where they each stuggle with the shallowness of their worklives. One writes:

"We accept that a corporation determines our life's routines. It's the trade-off so that we don't have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we'd at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn't matter."

On that level, the story is dark and depressing. But Coupland is a humourist, somewhat like Vonnegut. JPod has an ensemble cast of completely wacky characters who face an ongoing series of bizarre and laughable work and non-work situations. And similar to reading Kafka, the social norms and patterns that can deaden our lives are transformed into fodder for a top-notch comedy. A wonderful read!

A hilarious satire of modern capitalism and consumerism.

i love this book b/c of it's quirky-ness, the fast pace of the plot and hilarious laugh-out-loud dialogue. it reminded me of my time working at a 3d animation studio!

Microserfs, the predecessor to this book, is one of my favorite books. This book funnily has some of the most conflicted reviews I have read on here. The extreme amount of one and five star reviews is crazy. A lot of these reviews surround its connection to its predecessor and to Coupland’s body of work as a whole. I do understand the wide disparity though.

There are tons of what was in Microserfs here, but just with less of the charm of and emotional connections to the characters. That is replaced with extreme absurdity. The book goes all the way in depicting a weird world full of maximalist situations. Murder, human trafficking, heroine abuse, and so much more is brought up and just piles on with little emphasis or gravity. The book almost seeks to take what Microserfs did and laugh at it. Point a finger and jeer at it. The book peers at you with these bulging eyes while it hyperventilates. I much prefer the sincerity of the first book’s characters and their connections, which was one of the main reasons I loved the book in the first place. This one foregoes that in a way that can come off as a lazy rebranding of characters and their respective stereotypical appearances.

Some of things just leave a bad taste in my mouth like Coupland’s villainous self-insert and the resolution of the book. However, the book is still fun and engaging. Coupland has an ability to write bizarre situations endlessly across 400 pages. But the book is missing the binding to hold those pages, making a lot of these situations absurd without satisfaction.

One star was generous, trust me.

It's hard to believe that this is the man who authored the book that made me want to become a writer. He wrote three brilliant books, at the beginning of his career, his last being Microserfs...Then I watched him fall shorter and shorter with each subsequent release.

He became a watered down version of his former self with each new book published, not unlike the de-evolution of sitcom characters who become caricatures of their original concept, left with only the qualities most praised by the masses. Shallow versions of their former selves.

The same can be said for Coupland's Jpod. This book is full of self-absorbed pretension. He does his very best to imitate a great author (young Douglas Coupland) but his attempts at bizarre situations are failed, and his inclusion of himself as a character in his book raises the self-aggrandizing bar to new heights (or lows, depending on your view)

He wastes page after page with binary codes, and random words that have little to no relevance to the "story", taking up space, and raising the page count and price of the book.

It seems as if he was merely attempting to recreate Gen X and Microserfs with different names for the characters.

This book was so bad, I wouldn't even be willing to trade it, sell it or give it away as I could never do something so malicious to another literate human being.

So there it is. One man wrote one of the best books I've ever read, and one of the worst. It may be time to wash my hands of his work completely.

JPadding
My daughter and I are big fans of Coupland, so I bought her this for Christmas. At first glance, it looks like a substantial piece of work (~560 pages), but it's actually quite a short book (I read it in 1.5 days). The disparity arises, of course, because of all the large-font pages and lists of numbers that are inserted into the story. It's a trick that merits some consideration: the former suggest a fascination with the form of words that portrays them as artistic objects in the book, but it's hard to see any justification (artistic or otherwise) for the latter.

I found the stream-of-consciousness passages much more interesting. These are extended meditations on subjects like marketing, technology, pod life and gaming, which make extensive use of what I can only describe as the language of the web. For example, he intersperses words from adult sites ("Blondes. Bondage. Brunettes. Celebrities.") with instructions from bulletin boards ("You may not post new threads. You may not post replies."). These passages also include the smart observations that Coupland specialises in ("It's quite easy to tell which text has been typed by someone living in the Indian subcontinent because they all too frequently forget to put spaces after periods or commas. Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. If you can control your emotions, chances are you don't have too many.")

Of course, there's the story as well, but I didn't really think this was so stimulating, especially when compared to his other work. This book has been viewed by some as a sequel to his excellent Microserfs, but at times it reads as an update, or replacement, for that book (i.e. you're intended to read one or the other, but not both). Perhaps I've become over-familiar with his work, but it felt as if he was drawing on a cast of characters (the geek, the tough but sensitive girl, the lesbian, the dysfunctional parents) and plot elements (the dead body, the romance, the marketing meeting, the Chinese sweatshop) that have become standard for him. And maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't find anything funny or diverting in the offhand way that one of the characters became addicted to heroin, and then appeared to treat it as a good thing.

However, the story still contains moments of coruscating brilliance: my favourite comes when the hero is wondering how electrons exist in isolation, and his podmate, without even looking up, just says "Quarks, aisle three" - a gnomic putdown that combines technical detail (not that electrons and quarks have much to do with each other in reality) and cultural allusion in a way that completely sums up the breadth of Coupland's abilities and obsessions.

Originally reviewed 12 March 2008