JPod - Softcover

Coupland, Douglas

3.7

19,872 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596911050 ISBN 13: 9781596911055

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

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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.
Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also work in visual arts and theater. His novels include Generation X, Microserfs, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, and Eleanor Rigby. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Praise for JPod: "JPod is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away."-New York Times Book Review"It's to [Coupland's] credit that in JPod he's still nimble enough to take the post-modern man-too young for Boomer nostalgia and too old for youthful idealism-and drown his sorrows in a willful, joyful satire that revels in the same cultural conventions that it sends up."-Rocky Mountain News
"It's time to admire [Coupland's] virtuoso tone and how he has refined it over 11 novels. The master ironist just might redefine E. M. Forster's famous dictate 'Only connect' for the Google age."-USA Today
"Zeitgeist surfer Douglas Coupland downloads his brain into JPod."-Vanity Fair
Also available: JPod - HC ISBN-10 1-59691-104-2 ISBN 13 978-1-59691-104-8 $24.95 All Families Are Psychotic - PB, ISBN-10 1-58234-215-6 ISBN-13 1-58234-215-3 $13.95 Hey Nostradamus! - PB, ISBN-10 1-58234-415-9 ISBN-13 1-58234-415-7 $13.95 Eleanor Rigby - HC, ISBN-10 1-58234-5

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Review:

Already dubbed Microserfs 2.0 by some pundits--a winking allusion to Douglas Coupland's previous novel Microserfs, which similarly chronicled pop-culture-damaged twentysomething misfits flailing, foundering, and occasionally succeeding in the high-tech sector--JPod is, like all of Coupland's novels, a byproduct of its era and yet strangely detached from it. Only this time with a bold and very crafty narrative device: Douglas Coupland, novelist, is a character in Douglas Coupland's novel. Which, when you think about it, makes sense since the type of people Coupland depicts are precisely the type of people who consume Coupland novels. As the once-great comedian Dennis Miller might holler, "Stop him before he sub-references again!" Readers familiar with Coupland's oeuvre know what to expect with the characterizations here. They also know that Coupland on a roll is both savagely observant and laugh-out-loud funny: "Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweathshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. [She said] 'I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors.'" Much of the book is like that, built on granular and meandering exchanges between characters about . . . stuff. While JPod's flow is hobbled by some preposterous twists and character traits and by random words, phrases, and numbers splattered gratuitously across successive pages in oversized typeface, it's hard to imagine Coupland fans walking away disappointed. --Kim Hughes

About the Author:

Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also work in visual arts and theater. His novels include Generation X, Microserfs, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, and Eleanor Rigby. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

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