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    JPod
    JPod
    JPod
    Ebook528 pages5 hours

    JPod

    By Douglas Coupland

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    JPod, Douglas Coupland's most acclaimed novel to date, is a lethal joyride into today's new breed of tech worker.

    Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames begin with "J" are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod's universe is amoral, shameless, and dizzyingly fast-paced like our own.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 10, 2008
    ISBN9781596917101
    JPod
    Author

    Douglas Coupland

    Douglas Coupland first came to prominence as the author of Generation X (1995). He followed that with a sequence of ever-more daring and inventive novels, including Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus! He lives in Vancouver.

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    Reviews for JPod

    3.5/5

    991 ratings42 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The back-blurbs don't lie: JPod is a compulsively fast read that engages you and draws you along. However, while it engaged and amused me, I can't say I liked it all that much. The amorality of the characters was offputting and made them less interesting; the PoMo conceit of putting the author in the book seemed stale and, in this case, contrived. Unlike Microserfs, wherein moments of transcendence and meaning rose out of the rich white noise of geek life, here the white noise seems to serve itself first, foremost and forever. Maybe that's supposed to be a comment on modern mores. But as a Gen-Xer and a geek...I think he's selling us short.
    • 4/5
      Can there be any doubt that Douglas Coupland is now firmly entrenched as a leading influence in Canadian society? After all, in his new novel jPod, “I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel,” are the first words a character utters. It would appear Coupland couldn’t ignore his own cultural impact.Coupland made a name for both himself and his peer group when he penned the exceedingly popular novel Generation X. Since that time, his output of approximately one novel a year has earned him a unique berth as one of Canada’s premier pop culture commentators.In jPod, Coupland revisits the motif of arguably his finest novel Microserfs, a work that encapsulated the zeitgeist of the late 1980s computer work force. Not so much a literal sequel to Microserfs as it is a thematic one, jPod is vintage Coupland, and whether or not that is a good thing may depend on the mindset of the reader.jPod is the nickname for six determinedly quirky game designers, all of whose names begin with the letter j. Described as mildly autistic – “poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured” – the team is unhappily working on a skateboarding simulation, the hero of which has been unexpectedly re-imagined as a wisecracking turtle.As the characters follow their daily routines, avoiding work and throwing out Simpsons references as naturally as breathing, one designer, Ethan Jarlewski, suffers a crisis of faith. “I was pleased to be able to earn a living within an industry that’s increasingly more corporate and bland and soul-killing, but…then I got to wondering if I even possessed the ability to fall in love with another human being and…I began to feel like such a module.”Happily, Coupland’s knack for capturing the mood of a particular time is still intact. He has also not lost his partiality for unorthodox plot twists; illegal refugees, grow-ops, ballroom dancing, and appearances by Coupland himself are only a few of the plot-twists Ethan manoeuvres as he seeks to unearth his own measure of happiness.Like Microserfs, jPod indulges Coupland’s appetite for abstract wordplay, visual puns, and numerical coding. Many of jPod’s pages consist of nothing but numbers as the designers divert themselves with challenges such as hunting for a displaced number in the first hundred thousand digits of pi.Yet as enormously diverting as jPod is, it suffers from familiarity. After the emotional heft of the striking Hey Nostradamus! and the gentle humour of the amusing if slight Eleanor Rigby, jPod’s turf is too similar to his early efforts. The setting is new, but jPod all too often seems like Microserfs Redux to its detriment.jPod, then, is coasting Coupland, engaging yet unsurprising. There is enough of the new to satisfy ardent fans, but those who admired Coupland’s steady progression from unknown quantity to established Canadian talent may view jPod as an inauspicious regression.
    • 3/5
      Some would say that this is Coupland's attempt to revisit his previous success with Microserfs, like revising a program to conform to 2.0 standards and they'd be correct. The problem here lies in the fact that sometimes like a program being ported to 2.0 status, what comes out is less impressive than the original.This book chronicles the lives of a group of people who code, except that this time around the topic is about video games, not basic building blocks of code that can be formed into more complex programs like Lego.I think Coupland was not as successful this time around, as the novel felt staid and lacking a certain heart that I've come to associate with the Microserfs team.Borrow it for the video game references.
    • 3/5
      Coupland has more fun with book design within these pages than he has since his debut novel Generation X. While still not measuring up to the bar set early in the author's career, J Pod delivers a few giggles, one or two pseudo-deep thoughts, and enough pop culture references to strangle a modestly sized basement full of hipsters.
    • 4/5
      Here we have a kind of follow-up to one of his older books titled MICROSERFS, where a group of Generation-Xers worked in the Microsoft© offices. Here the location is a videogame company, but the content is largely the same. Ethan (our hero) muddles his way through a psychotic family, weird co-workers and a bizarre set of circumstances which has him burying bodies, saving his boss from a Chinese sweatshop, and at times obsessing about evil Ronald McDonald©. Coupland admits that he loved writing this book and it shows - there’s a sense of fun and freedom that was lacking in some of his more recent novels. And to top it off, he’s put himself in as a character – the omnipotent ‘Doug’ manipulating the Jpodders towards a better life.
    • 5/5
      Douglas Coupland is one of those authors who can be a bit hit or miss, but I generally find him more of a hit. His last few books had been moving steadily away from his own popular image– all Generation X-ey – but with jPod he has most definitely returned to the likes of that book and – most obviously – Microserfs.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 fulfil 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 caricaturised characters and the scattershot plots, there is a theme of sorts (which Coupland handily unsubtly 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.
    • 3/5
      There's something vaguely disturbing about being cynical about the very medium you are using - is that irony? Coupland totally overdoes it, and frankly while it was fresh and edgy in Generation X, 15 years later it becomes old. Add to this an outlandlish plot and the author as a character and it gets rather tiresome. At least the main character, Ethan is endearing in his willingness to please and in his naivete.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as Microserfs, but worth reading. It'S really odd to find Coupland as a central character himself
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this one also & it's likely my favorite Coupland. Donating this one as I'm clearing my bookshelves for a move.
    • 4/5
      I unabashedly love Coupland's Microserfs. To me, JPod is a Twilight Zone paradigm of Microserfs with drugs and Asian gangsters thrown in. Oh, and Mr. Coupland also goes all Stephen King and includes himself as a character. It's all quite bizarre. I'm trying to separate the experience of reading this book from the context of Microserfs, and I can't quite do it. I liked this book, but I'm not sure how I would feel without the glow of my warm feelings for the earlier novel.The main difference, I think, is that Microserfs, at its core, was pretty warm. You really got a sense that the characters cared for each other (I did, at least). Not so in JPod. It's the same setup: a corps of programmers working together, with the main character dating another member of the group, the main character's parents, and a random sprinkling of outsiders. And you get some similar musings on time and identity, but it all seems so much shallower. And maybe that's the point. In that sense, it reminds me of my readings of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which (again, to me) espouses artistic integrity, and Atlas Shrugged, which is a money-grubbing capitalist manifesto. Except Coupland knows how to make his characters seem, you know, human, and also he's not insane. And I don't think he's necessarily trying to push an agenda, just reflecting the changes in the times - Microserfs captured the burgeoning tech culture, where just about everything was cutting-edge and "one-point-oh," whereas it's now become a more jaded thing with the same ills that plague the music, film, and publishing industries (with marketing dictating substance instead of the other way around).As an aside to Mr. Coupland (who will assuredly never read this, but what the hell), I apologize profusely for bringing Ayn Rand into a discussion of your work, even as a touchstone mostly for my own reference. You deserve better, sir.
    • 5/5
      After Miss Wyoming and All Families are Psychotic, I was afraid DC had lost his fastball.This is a return to form, and hopefully a sign of things to come from my favorite author.
    • 5/5
      I work in a cubicle farm called jPod with a small handful of geeks. It's called jPod because of a computer glitch that put six people whose last names start with the letter J in the space that was supposed yo have been a rock climbing wall, but which got cancelled because it was too twentieth century. Once you're in jPod there's no escaping, I tried for months, and simply gave up. Kaitlin's new here. She'll try hard to get out for a while, and then she'll simply accept her fate and try to get on with life as best she can.I enjoyed this book, with its offbeat characters (including the author himself) and its humour. I preferred it to the only other book of Douglas Coupland's that I've read which is "Girlfriend in a Coma".
    • 3/5
      Such a disappointment after Coupland's Microserfs.Hilarious throughout, I really did want to love JPod, hoping it would be some kind of sequel to Microserfs (which I suppose it is in a way). However, it was nothing like I expected.The one, single aspect that made me give this book such a low score? The incessant self referencing throughout the novel. Not only do the characters discuss Coupland himself… Coupland is a full-blown character in the novel too! This, I could not stand.
    • 3/5
      OK, but I liked Microserfs better.
    • 2/5
      Unfortunately, this smacks for Microserfs for Generationals.
    • 3/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As I've detailed here before, I have for most of my adult life been an obsessive fan of "Generation X" phrase-coiner Douglas Coupland; but while I read literally everything from his first book up to Miss Wyoming when younger, mostly for personal reasons, and have read literally everything from The Gum Thief to now for professional reasons, there's a chunk from 2000 to 2007 that I completely missed altogether (comprising the books All Families are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby and jPod), mostly because this was when Coupland reached the low point of his transition between Postmodernism and 21st-century "Sincerism," right at a point when I myself was doing a lot more writing of books in my life than the reading of them. I mean, take 2006's jPod as a good example, which was ostensibly meant to be a "conceptual sequel" of sorts to the biggest hit of his career, 1995's Microserfs, with the two novels sharing a lot of the same premises and details; but while Microserfs was a revelatory celebration of a coming geek entrepreneurial class just starting to show itself, jPod is an unimaginative reaction to our Web 2.0 times, with Coupland seemingly out of ideas about what to do with his old pop-culture shtick and quirky Aspie characters besides to ramp things up to an unsatisfyingly cartoonish level, but not yet understanding what he needed to do to change his career path into its next higher level. Eventually, of course, he did end up realizing what to do, which in a nutshell was to make his stories a lot weirder and darker (see Generation A and Player One, for example); but here where he was still floundering with it all, jPod feels very much like a Coupland simply waiting with boredom for the high-profile MTV shorts offer that were guaranteed to come with any early-2000s project of his (and indeed, jPod itself got made into a 13-episode show for Canadian television, with a novel that feels very much like a quickly done afterthought to that show instead of the other way around). As big a fan as I am of his, it's admittedly hard to justify this particular stretch of his career, so best perhaps to turn either to the books older than these or newer to save yourself some wasted reading experiences.Out of 10: N/A
    • 3/5
      I've resented Coupland for the whole Generation X thing for years and have always perceived him as a bit pretentious. Fair? Maybe not, but what are you going to do. A friend pushed this book on me and I have to say I enjoyed it. Coupland even appears as a character that plays off the image I had of him. Well played, Doug.
    • 3/5
      Engaging read. I particularly appreciated the self-deprecating Coupland way of including himself in the book. Engaging, and yet not as emotionally-connecting, nor as deeply-themed as Hey Nostradamus. I haven't read Microserfs yet.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed the pace and style of the book, and thought it conveyed some interesting food for thought about how we process things in the current age, as well as morals etc. It would have been slightly better if Coupland hadn't inserted so many obscenities and other blatantly, in your face, offensive bits into it, which seemed to serve no purpose, except, maybe, to add to the total randomness of the piece; I feel like the message could be equally conveyed without it.
      For that reason alone I shall not be recommending it to anyone; I shall, instead, find a better book in the same vain, or write one myself.
      Just watched Fight Club, which reminded me of this story because of the similar way it points to the meaninglessness of our consumer cubical driven lives.
    • 4/5
      This book is what made me want to become a computer programmer. In real life it is nothing like that. But a very fun, experimental book.
    • 4/5
      Excellent, funny, anarchic, and strangely accurate. I work as a software developer, and could identify several of the characters in the book as people I have worked with.
    • 3/5
      This is a pretty funny book about being a computer programmer with family problems. There are quite believable in my experience.
    • 3/5
      An entertaining read, though Coupland could do without all the repetition of number sequences/abbreviations within the book; save some paper, we get the point you're trying to make about the characters and their environment!
    • 2/5
      Microserfs is one of my favourites. I started out not liking JPod because it seemed a bit cold. I didn't find Ethan, the main character, very likable. It gradually won me over, after I accepted the fact that it's quite a different book than Microserfs was -- much more of a satire.

      I can see why people might not like this novel, but I think there are enough interesting thoughts about technology and culture to make it worthwhile (even if some of the insights are a little shallow). And, unexpectedly, it was pretty funny.
    • 3/5
      July 2007. Entertaining read. Assumes readers' intelligence. Especially liked the lists. My favorite list was the language list, which included Catalan (lisping) and Catalan (non-lisping). The self-referencial aspect was a bit tiresome and overdone. This was my book club's choice for this month's review. [We are 5 women, 4 men, only two of whom comprise a couple. We've been a book club since 1993, and have 3 original members, and 2 more members whose membership is almost as long.] One member said the book reminded him of PG Wodehouse, comparing Copeland's use of pop culture to Wodehouse's "period" color and motifs. My club rates on 1-5, but any decimal point between the cardinal numbers is accepted (even pi, but only 2 digits). I think the average was 3.6. My rating was 3.
    • 3/5
      I'm a big fan of Coupland, going back to the early 1990s but this book has been one of the few gaps in the collection for me. Reading it now, I don't have any regrets about waiting so long. As previous reviews have pointed out, this book was gimmicky and self-indulgent, and came at a low point in his career. Some of the episodes were funny, some of the thoughts were deep, but come on, 25 pages of prime numbers?''I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent the book twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." Kingsley Amis, on his son Martin's novel Money: A Suicide Note
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved this book. It was so clever and so much fun to read. On numerous occasions I laughed out loud while I was reading this (which was slightly embarrassing when I was sitting on the bus). Douglas Coupland even makes an appearance in his own novel. Very clever!!
    • 4/5
      "Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workres are bureaucratically marooned in Jpod, a no espcae architechtural limbon on the fringes of a massive Vancover video game design company. The six JPoders wage daily battle against the demands of a bone-headed marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan’s personal life is shaped by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijauan grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China." Fans of Coupland will love this unofficial follow-up to Microserfs. The same reference a minute style, same use of the unreal to make the real tangible, same clever language. Coupland creates a pop-culture mash-up not just in the content of the story but the makeup of the book as the novel is not confined by strict narrative on page. The use of symbols, nonsense, emails, etc. adds a unique communication that defines the time in which the book is set. This book is probably one of the more fun titles from Coupland despite some of the artistic arrogance. Closure might not always be the end goal but it is an entertaining read.
    • 3/5
      This is the first Douglas Coupland book I've read. Maybe it wasn't the best one to start with, because it came across as self-indulgent in a way that probably wouldn't have bothered me if I'd read lots of his other books. The pages of numbers were tedious to flick through and took the book to the level of 'nerdy in the extreme'. I liked the protrayal of the JPod characters which struck me as very realistic, having worked with techy people for a few years. Much of the rest of the book was wildly and deliberately unrealistic, but no less fun for all that.
    • 4/5
      JPod is Microserfs on amphetamines in Coupland's home town Vancouver, BC, already lovingly portrayed in his City of Glass. Sequels rarely match the quality of the original. This book is no exception. Coupland has transposed his Microserfs characters (Daniel is Ethan, Karla is Kaitlin, Todd is Cowboy, Ethan is Steve, Mom and Dad are Mom and Dad) while increasing their weirdness factor beyond belief, characters as caricatures. The work environment does not feel real either: His supposedly work-slave programmers spend their time doing anything but work, the pressure to "ship" a product so present in Microserfs isn't there. Management rarely shows up in this Dilbert world. Even if one accepts the surreal weirdness, the book suffers from Coupland's lazy approach towards his characters and plot: If a character runs into a road block or experiences pain, a bizarre deus ex machina instantly resolves the problem or switches the scene. The characters never have a chance to react, grow - and grow to be loved by the reader. It feels more like a string of levels in an Arcade game (This is also the problem of the already canceled eponymous Canadian TV series.). The instant gratification and attention deficit writing does not produce great literature. Coupland seems to acknowledge this by filling pages with the digits of pi - a writer's abdication (Shakespeare surrendering to the typing monkeys?). Overall, this book is better than the recent Coupland books, but lacks the depth and warmth of Microserfs. I wish Coupland would write fewer, better crafted books.

    Book preview

    JPod - Douglas Coupland

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