One of my favourite books, and possibly my first Douglas Coupland novel, was Microserfs published back in 1995. jPod is essentially a sequel. Not in the sense that it has the same characters. But in everything else it is. Except that we’re all older and wiser. Well not the characters. They’re still mid-twenties to, maybe, mid-thirties. There are six characters who site in the jPod, an area in a Vancouver based games company. They’re sat there broadly because of a computer fluke that sits people sharing the same surname initial in the same place – J.
Ethan’s the main character. He has some seriously screwed up parents – a mother who grows cannabis on an industrial scale and then deals it, and a dad who in the latter stages of his life has decided to become an actor but even in production-heavy Vancouver, can’t get that speaking part.
But it’s the fellow jPodders that we concentrate on: Bree, Evil Mark, Kaitlin, Cowboy and John Doe.
The story rolls along at a breakneck pace, and I sit there and can’t help feeling that Coupland has my life pretty much spot on. It’s amazing to learn, as I did on Wednesday evening when I attended a talk and book signing, that Coupland’s never worked in an office. But he’s spoken to a few people who have, and he’s got it right.
OK – so I don’t work in a games company who’s had their generic skateboarding game bastardised so that it includes a turtle because one of the manager’s sons really likes turtles at the moment. And I’m certainly not attempting to build a hidden Easter Egg slasher gorefest starring a certain fast-food derived character “Ronald”.
Aside from a couple of things like that, he’s got it right.
Actually Coupland himself is a fairly important character. Coupland says that he’s seen so much misinformation about himself on the web that I think he quite enjoyed perverting his own life. The Coupland in here is a manipulative bastard.
When you see this book in the shop you might notice that it’s a somewhat weightier tome than previous Coupland novels, but if long novels scare you, fear not: there are large chunks of, er, interesting text. Coupland is still an artist as well as a writer, and he enjoys the shape of writing on the page. So when there are several pages of large Chinese text it’s not just the literary equivalent of writing everything doublespace in college to make your reports or essays feel bulkier. Similarly, when you’re facing twenty or more pages of prime numbers or four pages of three letter words that are permissable in Scrabble, it feels completely right.
I completely loved this novel, racing through it far too fast, because it could be another ten years before Coupland next returns to this milieu.