I've never read Coupland before, so all I knew going into this 448 page novel was that Coupland used to be heralded as the Voice of My Generation (I think -- it's possible that he was the voice of the generation a little after me -- but that's close enough) and is now sometimes referred to similarly as being, like his books, a byproduct of the times, able to effectively communicate what it's like to live in a world oversaturated with information, a world of ever-expanding technology, the social web, the "digital age". Maybe that's true, still, but there's something hollow at the core of his new book that I don't think is necessarily representative of how people interact with each other and the world today.
In JPod, Coupland chronicles the career and life of Ethan Jarlewski, a video-game developer -- he works in JPod, a cubicle hive in the office, so named because all the members have last names that start with J. He and his co-workers have been designing a skateboarding game, but now the higher-ups suddenly want to add a cute turtle to the game because one of the bosses' sons loves turtles. His co-workers deal with this blow by shirking their responsibilities and having breakdowns. Meanwhile, his pot-growing mother and ballroom-dancing father are going through a series of weird, surrealistic events. Actually, so it Ethan -- the whole book is a series of weird, surrealistic events that ultimately don't add up to much.
The book is sometimes devestatingly funny, with lots of great one-liners and spot-on descriptions of the kinds of people in work in video gaming and the kinds of people who are dependent on the Internet for everything. Characters are bizarre characterizations of people that are interesting. There are some real insightful moments (I don't mean insightful like gaining a deep look into all humanity or something, but moments that made me say "Yeah, I get it, it is just like that"). But overall, the book is fluff without looking like it is supposed to be fluff. That might be my fault -- maybe I was supposed to know it would be fluff. Whole pages are devoted to mock-ups of Internet junk mail ads in extremely large typeface, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from them -- just because Coupland can reproduce the spam I get doesn't mean he is breaking it down in a meaningful way and saying something about it. He also devotes 30-40 pages (no, I didn't count, but it's a lot) to a string of numbers that, unless you have a lot of time on your hands and like numbers, you will just skip over and wonder what the point was. Among all these rather blatent attempts to makes us "feel" like we are connected to the Internet or doing something interactive, the story itself is kind of lazy and pretentious. It's an unbelivable farce, and while that's really fun at times (I did laugh out loud at several points), I wanted something more from this. Coupland also inserts himself as a character, which is funny at times but so self-indulgent, like he's trying too hard to be clever and has gone too far into eye-roll territory.
It's like cheap candy -- you'll eat it because you like candy, even though it's not your favorite kind, but once you're done, you'll wish the candy had tasted better. Still, it's candy, and you like candy, so you're happy you had some at all.
This is available in Pigott Library, call number F Coupland.