#20 JPod by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is my fav. Somehow the Border's at Block E in dwtwn Minneapolis, through some oversight had this book out on the shelves last Saturday, instead of Tuesday, which was it's official release date. Unfortunately, because of the enduring Amber Spyglass, I wasn't able to start reading this one until Tuesday anyway, but what can you do?



JPod is Coupland at his most Couplandesque. Six technogeeks working at a video game company in Vancouver wisecrack on pop culture while procrastinating work and dealing with the criminal and disordinary enterprises of their families and loved ones. Ethan, the focal technogeek, falls in love, repeatedly bails his parents out of trouble (his mom grows pot in the basement, his dad is an extra actor who is dying for a line [a la Ricky Gervais in his new show, Extras]), has a small adventure in China (wherein he meets Douglas Coupland) and tries to get through his day doing as little work as possible although still he tends to be at his office in jPod at all manner of non-standard hours. jPod is the name of their 6-person cube station in the office, because every one of their surnames begins with the letter J, and because it's a clever title, which will hopefully drive this novel to the top of the bestseller list.

I loved this book. I love it when the characters write Ebay profiles of themselves as though they were an item up for bid. I love its timeliness and modernity: one of the characters laments the fact that now, thanks to the internet, she can know everything; or when they speak about the technology boom of the 90s with such longing because these characters only arrived in time for the death rattle and the mass reherding of semi-skilled programmers and geeks into the soulless corriders of corporate computers. Gone is the lackadaisical optimisim of the protagonists of Microserfs. These jPod neo-geeks are more interested in undermining the crappy video game their new marketing executive has assigned them by inserting an ultraviolent Ronald McDonald to be unlocked like the pornography of GTA: San Andreas than they are interested in revolutionizing the world with code. I loved that Ethan was constantly having to parent his parents, that they created problems for themselves that they needed a son to straighten out.

Coupland really has a great sense of irony and beautifully acerbic feelings towards corporations, but he really captures the defeatist attitudes of the modern young adult. Attitudes which we were assigned by our parents and grandparents, by the Greatest Generation (TM), and the Boomers who gave us leisure and then berated us for taking advantage of it. One of the characters is in an english class, and we get samples of her assignments sometimes, one of them has a section that reads as an almost Breakfast Club essay on the peculiarities of our generation:

"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. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper. And then it's another day." (p.428)

We want to work. We want to contribute. We want to be challenged. But somehow the structure of our new capitalist society makes it seem so difficult.

For all its cleverness and fun, JPod really does speak directly to the underrealized potential of whatever the hell they're labeling our generation these days: "You're a depressing assemblage 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 you're prepetually on the brink of being obsolete--whether it's labour market obsolesence or cultural unhipness." (p.100)

I wouldn't mind seeing Coupland turn out one of these technogeek novels every ten years, just sort of updating on what's happening in the digital world and the people who work in its trenches. If you like Tetris, Legos or have at any time considered the Simpsons one of your favorite shows, this book is definitely for you. Also, if you have recently read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, you might find this a nice companion read.

This is now my favorite Douglas Coupland novel... Officially.

posted by Gabe @ 4:07 PM