Douglas Coupland could do better. The author who defined the grown-up children of the boomers as a disaffected, tech-savvy lot in his acclaimed collection of short stories, “Generation X,” could have created a much more engaging and entertaining story than he did in the meandering pages of “Jpod.”
Sure, the novel can be a fun read, with its loopy interludes (like random quotes for the tech literate from video games, toy packages, websites, epic chain e-mails, etc.), bizarre characters and ripped-from-the-cubicle dialogue, but the gestalt is ultimately an unsatisfying assemblage of ungainly episodes tied together by an unlikable protagonist and his unfortunate band of underachievers.
Ethan Jarlewski is a post-modern bohemian, an unmotivated cubicle jockey, who, with his team of miscreants and misfits, finds off-beat and sometimes creative ways to avoid doing actual work for their Vancouver video game development company. His wacky professional and personal lives are inextricable; he’s never really working, but he’s always thinking about work. At any given time of day or night, he could be:
1. Programming an ultraviolent hidden level (starring Ronald McDonald as a killer clown) for the insipid family video game his company is producing;
2. Helping his mother with some of the unsavory business aspects of her pot-growing enterprise;
3. Driving to Costco to purchase “a couple dozen boxes (of Cheerios) in a ratio of three boxes of Honey Nut to one box of classic Cheerios” for a senior developer;
4. Enduring his father’s whining about finding speaking roles in movies;
5. Challenging his team to write letters to Ronald McDonald, explaining why each of them would be the clown’s “ideal mate”;
6. Completing a podmate’s challenge to find the one non-prime number within a list of the 8,363 primes between 10,000 and 100,000 (and let there be no mistake: the numbers are listed across 18 pages of the novel); or
7. Suffering abuse from a character named Douglas Coupland. Wow, that’s original.
The first line of dialogue in “Jpod” is, “Oh God, I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.” It would be a forgivable snippet of self-indulgence if Coupland had dropped the joke right there. We get it. But he doesn’t let go. And when the character Coupland enters the novel later in the story, he turns an already fractured narrative into a derivative exercise. No amount of self-effacing humor can rescue the novel from becoming metafiction lite.
I should have loved this book; in many ways, I live the lifestyle of the “podders,” and I’m certainly of the right generation. But “Jpod” tries too hard to be authentic. Coupland’s chummy, informal style is so loose it has nothing to cling to.
A stronger narrative would have at least given his prose a place to perch, and his characters aren’t textured enough to hold the story together. And, yes, I get the point that they’re supposed to be one-dimensional caricatures for the author to build up and demolish, creating a searing, funny commentary on today’s hardworking slackers. But “Jpod” just doesn’t manage to deliver on those terms.
And one more thing: Coupland’s reliance on references to “The Simpsons” in order to convey his characters’ (and, by association, his) hipness is just tired and pathetic. No matter how smart the TV series still manages to be after nearly 20 years on the air, quoting it is passé. All it would take is one savvy surf through facebook.com to find a more apt reflection of the generation’s hyperawareness of pop culture.
And maybe that’s the problem with “Jpod” in general: It just feels lazy, as if Coupland was multitasking while he wrote the novel.
Oh. Wait. Now I get it.
Eric Elkins is a Denver area freelance writer, and editor at BiasDotCom.com. His website is DatingDad.com.
——————–
JPOD
By Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury, 448 pages, $24.95
