Book 55 - Douglas Coupland "JPod"
Jun. 15th, 2014 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveDouglas Coupland "JPod" (Bloomsbury)
Douglas Coupland is one of those authors who can be a bit hit or miss, but like Microserfs before it, more of a hit.
Published just over a decade ago, Microserfs was a look at the lives of a handful of geeks working at Microsoft. It was, like a lot of Coupland’s work, completely of its time, and full of conversations and jokes between its characters that wouldn't be too unfamiliar to the average poster of an internet message board.
Eleven years later, JPod comes back to the same idea, and reworks it for the early 21st Century – the book’s tagline is ‘Microserfs for the age of Google’.
The characters are different, but these are the heirs to those in Microserfs.
Working for a Canadian game design company, they have been thrown together into a department purely because all of their surnames begin with “J” – hence JPod.
The nominal narrator is Ethan (sharing a name with, but not the same person as, a previous Coupland character), around whom the plots more or less revolve. His mother grows cannabis on a commercial scale, opens the book by accidentally electrocuting a business partner/lover, and later toys with the idea of becoming a lesbian; she is married to Ethan’s dad, an ex executive who has given it all up to try and fulfill his role of getting a speaking part in one of the many TV shows and films being filmed around Vancouver, who is being stalked by someone Ethan went to school with. He is also an expert ballroom dancer, a passion he shares with Kam Fong, the genial people smuggling gangster friend of Ethan’s brother Doug who … you get the idea.
The other JPodders are Conrad the Cancer Cowboy, a sleep around sort of guy; Bree, also somewhat of a slut, but desperately trying to crawl her way up the workplace ladder; John Doe, brought up by a collective of radical feminist lesbians and originally called crow well mountain juniper, he’s trying to compensate for his extraordinary upbringing by being absolutely average in any way he can; Mark, so apparently normal that his podmates are convinced he must be evil, so call him Evil Mark; and Kaitlin, who’s new to the pod and hates them all as geeks. Their current task is to create a skateboarding game for the PS2, which is all going well until management decides what the game really needs is a cute interactive turtle. Even that gets abandoned for a cutesy fantasy type game, leading the jPodders to rebel by incorporating a feral version of Ronald McDonald into the game, who once unlocked, will wreak havoc on the game.
The plots are more or less incidental, though no less fun for it, as the various folk in Ethan’s life whirl around each other, popping up where you wouldn't expect them. One of the characters spends a chunk of the novel working in a Nike sweatshop in China, and it all makes perfect sense. There’s a degree of self-reference as well – Coupland is mentioned by the characters from the very first line, and he eventually shows up as a fairly snotty character about midway through, who plays a small, but significant, part in the plot’s resolution.
JPod is a lot of fun; it’s sharply written, easy to zip through, and genuinely funny. It’s not as ambitious as some of his more recent books, but you can’t really fault it for that. As Microserfs did, it is a product of its time and place, and I’d imagine a lot of folk here would find some similarities between themselves and what Coupland is writing about. Underneath the zeitgeisty surface, the caricatured characters and the scatter-shot plots, there is a theme of sorts (which Coupland handily unsubtle points out to those who may not have noticed it) but it’s never really the focus of the book, which always remains the observational comedy of one aspect of modern society.
If you've liked any of Coupland’s previous books, you’ll almost certainly like this.
Douglas Coupland is one of those authors who can be a bit hit or miss, but like Microserfs before it, more of a hit.
Published just over a decade ago, Microserfs was a look at the lives of a handful of geeks working at Microsoft. It was, like a lot of Coupland’s work, completely of its time, and full of conversations and jokes between its characters that wouldn't be too unfamiliar to the average poster of an internet message board.
Eleven years later, JPod comes back to the same idea, and reworks it for the early 21st Century – the book’s tagline is ‘Microserfs for the age of Google’.
The characters are different, but these are the heirs to those in Microserfs.
Working for a Canadian game design company, they have been thrown together into a department purely because all of their surnames begin with “J” – hence JPod.
The nominal narrator is Ethan (sharing a name with, but not the same person as, a previous Coupland character), around whom the plots more or less revolve. His mother grows cannabis on a commercial scale, opens the book by accidentally electrocuting a business partner/lover, and later toys with the idea of becoming a lesbian; she is married to Ethan’s dad, an ex executive who has given it all up to try and fulfill his role of getting a speaking part in one of the many TV shows and films being filmed around Vancouver, who is being stalked by someone Ethan went to school with. He is also an expert ballroom dancer, a passion he shares with Kam Fong, the genial people smuggling gangster friend of Ethan’s brother Doug who … you get the idea.
The other JPodders are Conrad the Cancer Cowboy, a sleep around sort of guy; Bree, also somewhat of a slut, but desperately trying to crawl her way up the workplace ladder; John Doe, brought up by a collective of radical feminist lesbians and originally called crow well mountain juniper, he’s trying to compensate for his extraordinary upbringing by being absolutely average in any way he can; Mark, so apparently normal that his podmates are convinced he must be evil, so call him Evil Mark; and Kaitlin, who’s new to the pod and hates them all as geeks. Their current task is to create a skateboarding game for the PS2, which is all going well until management decides what the game really needs is a cute interactive turtle. Even that gets abandoned for a cutesy fantasy type game, leading the jPodders to rebel by incorporating a feral version of Ronald McDonald into the game, who once unlocked, will wreak havoc on the game.
The plots are more or less incidental, though no less fun for it, as the various folk in Ethan’s life whirl around each other, popping up where you wouldn't expect them. One of the characters spends a chunk of the novel working in a Nike sweatshop in China, and it all makes perfect sense. There’s a degree of self-reference as well – Coupland is mentioned by the characters from the very first line, and he eventually shows up as a fairly snotty character about midway through, who plays a small, but significant, part in the plot’s resolution.
JPod is a lot of fun; it’s sharply written, easy to zip through, and genuinely funny. It’s not as ambitious as some of his more recent books, but you can’t really fault it for that. As Microserfs did, it is a product of its time and place, and I’d imagine a lot of folk here would find some similarities between themselves and what Coupland is writing about. Underneath the zeitgeisty surface, the caricatured characters and the scatter-shot plots, there is a theme of sorts (which Coupland handily unsubtle points out to those who may not have noticed it) but it’s never really the focus of the book, which always remains the observational comedy of one aspect of modern society.
If you've liked any of Coupland’s previous books, you’ll almost certainly like this.
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Date: 2014-06-16 05:28 am (UTC)One of the characters spends a chunk of the novel working in a Nike sweatshop in China, and it all makes perfect sense.
Now that has to be quite the accomplishment. lol..........
I am not sure if it's a story that I would want to read or not, but I have to admit it's kind of intriguing. lol...
Hugs, Jon