JPod - Douglas Coupland

"Oh God, I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."
"That asshole"
"Who does he think he is?"


As opening lines to novels go that was a first for me. I've never known an author name check them self so brazenly and I have to say it set me off on the wrong foot with this book.

I've never read Coupland before so wasn't really sure what to expect. As the celebrated ...
...IT literate book for the information age. What I got was something far less, a self serving work lacking irony and intelligence. A book that wastes the reader's time and provides little in return.

But I'm rushing to a conclusion so let me step back and tell you a little about it before I completely trash it.

The story follows events over a year or so of Ethan Jarlewski's life. A regular kind of guy he doesn't do much ... more

"Oh God, I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."
"That asshole"
"Who does he think he is?"

As opening lines to novels go that was a first for me. I've never known an author name check them self so brazenly and I have to say it set me off on the wrong foot with this book.

I've never read Coupland before so wasn't really sure what to expect. As the celebrated author of 'Generation X' I was looking forward to an IT literate book for the information age. What I got was something far less, a self serving work lacking irony and intelligence. A book that wastes the reader's time and provides little in return.

But I'm rushing to a conclusion so let me step back and tell you a little about it before I completely trash it.

The story follows events over a year or so of Ethan Jarlewski's life. A regular kind of guy he doesn't do much that is exciting but he has the misfortune to find himself at the centre of a series of bizarre events.
The team leader of a group of video game developers who form a very small and low level part of global entertainment corporation he sees his ambitions to build a brilliant world-changing game constantly thwarted by the meddling of focus group informed executives.
The team therefore spend their days sabotaging the games with hidden rooms and levels and by setting each other ridiculous internet challenges.

Outside of work Ethan is saddled with a demanding dysfunctional family. There is his mother, ostensibly a classic American Mom who bakes apple pie but one who also grows military strength marijuana on an industrial scale and carries an automatic weapon. She's not averse to killing late paying Hell's Angels and roping in Ethan to help bury the body.
There is his father who gave up a successful career to be a film extra, he also has overwhelming obsessions with both ballroom dancing and dating Ethan's former high school friends.
There is his brother, a successful property developer who also acts as point man for a Chinese people trafficker, often using Ethan's one bedroom apartment as a safe house for dozens of illegal immigrants. Finally there is Kam Fong, the Chinese trafficker, who insinuates his way into Ethan's life and shares his father's passion for ballroom dancing.
There isn't really any plot as such, no start and end, just a glimpse at what will happen to a normal person when characters such as these get involved in your life.

Now this all sounds pretty good so far, a good satirical novel needs its fair share of oddball characters and this book has them in spades. The trouble is they are all a little too broad brush, the situations a little too far removed from reality, to really work. There are several very funny set pieces throughout the book, Ethan's mother shooting a bad customer's dog is a lot funnier than it sounds, but they never work themselves into a cohesive whole. It's just too contrived to work effectively as satire.

Coupland's style and presentation is incredibly annoying. The conceit of the book is that it is a representation of the contents of Ethan's laptop, conned out of him by the author. The bulk of the narrative is meant to be diary based, but there are dozens of spam e-mails and errant internet searches most of which are painfully reproduced word for word. This amounts to a huge amount of, what can only be called, padding. There are pages of unbroken spam without a single carriage return, followed by three solid pages of dollar signs. That's right - $$$$$$$$ for three pages.

Amongst the page wasting is a list of the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 as well as the 972 three-letter words permitted in scrabble and pi to a hundred-thousand digits. That last little gem runs unbroken through pages 408 to 435, and is followed by a list of random numbers with a capital O inserted in the middle that runs for another unbroken 30 pages. According to Coupland these pages should be viewed in the same way you would view a Warhol print; as an abstract whole. That might work on one level as I don't have a lot of time for Warhol either but personally I think it's a load of nonsense and he's just underlining his own geek status by having done this research and wanting, in a rather puerile way, to impress the reader.
Unfortunately, as his characters and most of his readership would know, you could find all this with five minutes work on Google. The book runs to 550 pages but take out all the rubbish, and use the same font throughout and I doubt it would go far beyond 250. Oh yes, there's one more thing. Remember how Coupland name checked himself in the first line? Well, in the final third of the book he actually introduces himself as a character and becomes central to the whole story. Post modern gonzo irony, or self pleasuring ego trip? Who knows, but it did nothing but detract from the book and annoyed the hell out of me.

Coupland burst to popular acclaim with his first book 'Generation X' in 1991. A genuinely zeitgeist riding work that introduced both the title and the term McJob into the general lexicon. This was followed in 1995 by 'Microserf's', presciently timed to coincide with the launch of Windows 95 and Microsoft's bid for world domination. I haven't read these but their reputation and therefore that of the author is impressive and as a social commentator he is ranked highly. I doubt this will be enhanced by JPod, while those earlier books might have been genre defining and original this is neither and is out of step with a more savvy audience.

In the early nineties PC ownership was low and the internet a largely unknown quantity. By the end of the decade PC ownership was mainstream and internet access was universal. People had fun with computers then; we'd have a laugh at odd things on eBay, read spam e-mails because they were rare, send each other amusing pictures and generally surf aimlessly. That was ten years ago, now PCs are ubiquitous and the internet is a tool to be used. Nobody reads spam because there's too much of it and even my Mum trades on eBay. The point is the characters in the book would not be doing the things the author has them doing and no one reading it will think it's about them in the way they did about 'Generation X'. Somewhere along the line it looks like Coupland has lost touch.

If you want to see a modern satire on IT workers in the information age read Dilbert cartoons. It must be fifteen years since Scott Adams worked in an office but while Coupland has fallen behind he remains frighteningly current be it in technology, worker attitude or management methodology.

I'm finding it very hard to find things to recommend about this book. It has funny moments, but there are funnier books out there. It has an interesting take on corporate life but again is not as incisive or witty as his reputation led me to believe.

On the cover The Sunday Times is quoted as saying the book is: "Very funny". They're wrong, it isn't. The Irish Times calls him "the ace chronicler of the techno times." Guess again.

No, I can't think of anything to recommend this book. 

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