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52 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dan Brown in gameland, June 19, 2006
You just never know with Coupland, do you? Sometimes it is simply magnificent (Hey Nostradamus! Life after God) or at least sweet and moving (Shampoo Planet); sometimes it is a downright failure (Girlfriend in a Coma; All families are psychotic); and sometimes you get something in between, something that is very clever and entertaining and post-postmodern and selfconsciously self-deprecatory - and yet, the moment you turn the final page ("play again? y/n") you forget all about it (JPod). Maybe the forgettability was intentional in this novel about geeks who work in game development and who are obsessed with futile details and highly transitory, pointless hypes. The plot is way over the top and clearly not meant to be taken seriously, nor are we for a moment expected to believe (I hope) that any of these people might actually exist. We get (**spoilers**) a weed-growing mom who kills and turns lesbian; a sinister Asian man-smuggler who's only interested in 'making people happy'; an autistic teamleader who turns heroine addict and thus finds happiness; a dyke called freedom (no capital f) who turns into a bimbo called Kimberly; Coupland himself as Deus ex machina; and an outing to China thrown in for good measure. Coincidences abound and the point of all the frantic plot twists remains a mystery. Unless the point is the deconstruction of the novel as such.
There are several good laughs in JPod, and you won't be bored. The book however lacks the memorable observations and oneliners found in other, better Coupland works, such as Generation X. JPod is simply too facile - it takes a little more than quoting computerbabble, product packages, and internet-vernacular to be a chronicler of our times. This far-fetched story with its barrage of embedded puzzles rather felt like the (supposedly) intellectual counterpart to The Da Vinci Code. There is also a degree of arrogance I found somewhat off-putting. Coupland doesn't mind making his readers pay for 41 pages (!) covered with decimals of pi. Other pages are filled with chinese characters; the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000; brand names; listings of product ingredients, and what not. All, of course, printed with the mandatory typograhical quirks that are the bane of novels these days. This book may feel heavy when you pick it up, but rest assured that most of it is fluff.
My advice? Sample before buying. If you are a first-time Coupland reader, there are much better places to start.
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21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
More depressing than disappointing, if that's even possible., June 10, 2006
I have been a huge Coupland fan since I ran across a copy of Life After God at a Coles close-out sale in 1995. He used to write in a way that touched something deep and personal in me, yet which felt universal at the same time. I didn't mind that he was speaking for my generation (though I'm slightly younger than dictionary-definition "generation x"), because he did it so deftly and accurately. I have gone out of my way to see him read on pretty much every occasion that he's come to Toronto since 1995, and he definitely influenced not just my own writing, art, etc., but my own consciousness; my feelings of awareness and connectedness to my extended peer group.
Since...hmm...well, Miss Wyoming was maybe the beginning of the slide, but *definitely* since All Families are Psychotic, Coupland has basically been performing the literary equivalent of a face-first downhill slide. He's almost completely stopped caring about any of his characters' inner lives. He's stopped bothering to develop his characters' personalities or relationships with each other. The larger themes he used to explore so well - defining and exploring personal responsibility and morality in a postmodern world, lonliness and isolation, searching for meaning as a generation raised without religion - are completely gone.
I'm all for artists' development over time. I think it's great when a band like REM or an artist like Elvis Costello keeps looking inside themselves to see what's next, what's interesting for them to pursue. But I HATE when artists get lazy and start using the bare-bones premises of their style to churn out predictable, empty and vapid copies based on work that once showed sincerity and ingenuity.
I am the age of the characters in jPod AND someone who has been personally influenced by Coupland in my own development, and I have to say that I honestly couldn't relate to ANYTHING about ANY of them. That's partly because they were so 2-D, but also because they were all spoke with the exact same voice, and were completely blase about everything. I don't know anyone like that.
They had no conflicts, they cared about nothing, they were affected by nothing, and, in the end, they were absolutely unchanged in any way. Who writes like this? Who writes a novel that is longer than 400 pages like this?
Their relationships with each other were utterly ridiculous and meaningless.
Coupland re-uses his "pages of random text" schtick, which was Daniel's attempt to give his computer a subconscious in Microserfs and is completely decontextualized here.
And, most nauseating of all, he writes himself into the book as an over-the-top omniscient villain type character. I had to choke back bile each time.
An utterly, completely repulsive novel.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A heavily satiric look into the future, July 5, 2006
Is it possible that Douglas Coupland fancies himself the next iteration of John Updike? With the release of JPOD, Coupland delivers what could be considered the second book in a series modeled, however loosely, on Updike's renowned Rabbit Angstrom novels. Updike explored the cultural milieu of four decades in his teratology centered on a single character. Coupland's approach is slightly different, but his intention appears similar.
A look at the cover of JPOD, which features six Lego people, immediately calls to mind Coupland's 1996 novel MICROSERFS, which also sported a Lego figure on the cover. Both novels explore the lives of computer coders searching for meaning, and each does so in the very time-specific context of its moment. Indeed, the characters in JPOD explicitly sneer at many of the cultural cues that formed the backdrop of MICROSERFS.
Sneering might well be an apt description of the tone of JPOD, and that's a change from the more earnest feel of the earlier book. Coupland's latest is black comedy to be sure, but its heavily satiric style results in something of a backlash aimed at the very generation the author named with 1991's GENERATION X. Neither Coupland the author nor Coupland the character --- and he is a key and evil character in JPOD --- seems very fond of Xers.
In fact, the novel's narrator, Ethan Jarlewski, finds himself in a particularly combative relationship with Coupland, though that's hardly Ethan's only problem. He and the other jPodders, so named because all the members of this game design team have last names beginning with "j," spend their days trying to thwart the stupidity of their company's higher-ups. Ethan must also deal with his pot-growing mother, hapless would-be actor father, and people-smuggling brother, among various other broadly drawn characters.
None of these characters, including the jPodders, are particularly likable with the possible exception of Kaitlin, the newest member of the team and Ethan's love interest. All the characters are funny, however, and it must be said that JPOD's thin plot is held together by Coupland's ability to create preposterous yet humorous set pieces for his characters. The book's plot is often put on hold for a variety of asides that ultimately feel rather self-indulgent on Coupland's part. Ranging from a page filled with the words "ramen noodles" to pages upon pages devoted to pi --- with one wrong digit supposedly hidden among the tens of thousands presented --- these passages eventually become wearying.
Does JPOD capture the current zeitgeist with the same keen-eyed accuracy of Coupland's earlier novels? Perhaps. But Coupland's forecast for the future seems changed. Despite a quasi-happy ending, JPOD is more bleak than hopeful. It will be interesting to see what the little Lego figures presage if Coupland returns to them ten years hence.
--- Reviewed by Rob Cline (rob__cline@hotmail.com)
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