I'm not sure why this stuck in my brain, but I saw book on display in a Canadian bookstore in the summer of 2006 and have wanted to read it ever since. When I stumbled across it in my local bookstore a few months ago, I knew it must be time to see if my 15 year-old hunch was onto something. A pull quote on the back of my hardback copy reads "Bring along a seatbelt, because Coupland delivers a fast, furious read." This is accurate. The book is set in the world of a video game company in the mid-2000s, and that alone makes the book worth reading in 2021. Stylistically the book mirrors the experience of sifting through the internet, with various nonsequiturs punctuating an already zany narrative. The author inserts himself into the story as a sort of deus ex machina conflict/savior in the latter part of the novel, amping up the self-deprecation in a way that made me read the device as clever and playful rather than arrogant or lazy. There are various commentaries on society, the tech world, and narrative structure that were worthy of contemplation in the moment, though none of them lead to any big picture revelations or weighty ideas to grapple with after I finished. But this was a very fun book to read and in the end I walked away feeling equal parts entertained and disappointed that there was no more of this world to explore.

2018 review: Want to see the first 100,000 digits of pi and try to find the one error? They are listed in this book on pages 331-352! What about the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 with one error? Pages 213-228! A book essentially about nothing - an eclectic group of 20 somethings working for a software company (JPod), and their crazy lives/lifestyles interspersed with random pages like those above! The truth? I really liked Coupland when I was younger, but I think I've had my full. It has began to feel that although is books are innovative, funny and, possibly groundbreaking... they don't say much! 6 out of 12.

2010 view: Bizzarro style avant garde tale of the everyday life of a computer games programmer and his fellow work colleagues in the 'Jpod' collection of cubicles that they work in. The 'jpod' is named such, as all the team's surnames begin with a 'J'. The darkly comic and often manic tale includes a trip to China, a people smuggling drug dealer that likes ballroom dancing, a eclectic mix of JPodders and... Coupland dares to place himself in the book as a significant supporting character, but I feel that he pulls it off. Thoroughly enjoyed this, but wouldn't have missed anything if I had never read it. 6 out of 12

Just finished reading “Jpod” by Douglas Coupland. It’s the second time I’ve read his books; the first being ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which I find endearing and amusingly empowering. This one, however, induces a familiar yet quite a different kind of hilarity; it got me to palm my face every five pages or so; I had to hold the escaping chuckles through my teeth so that other passengers in the bus wouldn’t think I’m crazy; I need to put this book in the time-out corner like three times a day until I can get through the intense irony and blatant shenanigans without shedding any tears (of misery? of joy? Who knows) and actually relishing in making fun of the absurd, surreal lives in the neo-capitalist, technology cusp hellhole.

At one glance, Ethan Jawlerski is just one of your typical, average white-collared employees you can see in and out of the office complex amongst many similar faces. He could stop you on the street to ask for the time and the second he left you would have already forgotten what he looks like. But with a little digging, we found out how wacko his life is.

For most of the time, he’s stuck in his little cubicle alongside his team ‘Jpod’ whose sole purpose in coming to work is ‘to do amazingly little’ and yet still give the illusion of being the most productive employees-of-the-year. His co-workers —the Jpodders— crow well mountain juniper (all lower case) a.k.a John Doe, Bree Jyang, Casper ‘Cancer Cowboy’ Jesperson, Evil Mark, and the enchanting newcomer Kaitlyn Joyce, are more than willing to jump in the honorary procrastination and enthusiastically participating in a series of friendly competitions involving first hundred thousands of pi, love letter for Ronald McDonald, or simply comprising list of new Lucky Charm shapes. Anything to delay the production of the new skateboard video game they’re currently developing for a gaming company under the passive-aggressive management of Steve Lefkowitz, the new boss of jPod.

And as if he lacks any source of trouble, here goes his lovely parents Carol and Jim Jarlewski ready to drag him around to fix up their mess of questionable financial ventures and underhanded promiscuity. Even the supposedly put-together older brother, Greg, did little to nothing to alleviate his burden of bearing immature parents. To make matters worse, he prided himself as a global visionary and dabbled in a morally gray business plan with China conglomerates, which resulted in introducing the wild card Kam Fong and umm, his ‘travel associates’ to the picture. As the cherry on top, Douglas Coupland himself popped up playing the devil —seriously, if the God appears in the next chapter as an old Southern man having a drink in a dim bowling bar with Big Jarlewski Lebowski, I would’ve figured as much.

The plethora of characters with each their own endearing quirks are the basis for most of the side-splitting, tear-inducing, laugh-until-you-can't-breathe happiness of a romping good time in the novel. The character flaws and unique personality traits dominantly act as the red thread over the course of the story, making it less like an actual plot than a mere string of wildly nonsensical situations that the characters help themselves in — much like ‘Seinfield’, where nothing happens but quite a lot of mess ensues. Everyone seems to live in a gray area as a consensus and deviate themselves from the norm, even the presumably law-abiding citizens such as Ethan’s middle-aged mother, who owns a marijuana farm, accidentally ended someone’s life and proceeded to bury the body in a mogul’s backyard.

There’s a part of the novel that strikes hard on me, particularly Kaitlyn’s line “....you feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblages of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete—whether it’s labour market obsolescence of cultural unhipness and it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle ….” It goes without saying that the competition for self-authenticity has not stopped since puberty where our ego develops and believes that we are exceptional. When the Jpodders were challenged to post a love letter for Ronald, they proved that in their conceivable uniqueness lies the fact that they were bound by something similar. It doesn’t matter how widely different their backstories are, each character has the shared experience of Big Mac and Fries. It echoes the premise that no matter how much we believe that we are the arbiter of our own identity, we are still a part of the general socio economic scheme, making it impossible for us to be the only one of its kind. How I wish my 14-year-old self knew that.

As a millennial who has entered the workforce for 10+ years, the theme of widespread despondency around the Jpodders has never been more appealing to me than now. Years and years of toxic productivity propaganda was revealed to be nothing more than a way for the rich to drive the poor to work harder for them in exchange for pittance. A constellation of qualities: severe pain, consistent degradation and insufferable humiliation; was all it took to notice the unjustified labor compensation the corporation has given its worker, and they slowly took a stance. The Jpodders procrastinate not solely on the ground of laziness but rather as an act of reclaiming their wasted time on hopeless projects. When the plan of reconfiguration of the game loomed as a threat on the horizon, they quietly lays the groundwork of a hidden gorefest gamechanger within the code as a way to protest the mismanagement of the heartless corporate, who views their toil and exertion as nothing more but money-making scheme, forgetting the fact that the one who works behind the cubicles are human, not a piece of statistic. This nuanced issue still resonates to a decade later, even more so than before as newer, more socially-conscious Gen Z starts to enter the workforce and trendset the “quiet quitting”, “lay down” and “lay to rot” movement.

The only flaw I find is the Douglas Coupland character itself, whose self-insertion probably proved that either he thinks it’s more fun if you’re joining the game that you created and/or he concluded that it’s easier to find closure if the all-encompassing, cryptic character you based on yourself can serve as a plot device. Either way, I certainly can do without him.

To say the least, I absolutely enjoyed the book and this has given me great joy to read. I’m trying not to sound sycophantic but honestly, I would read everything he ever writes.