JPod
by Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury 2006
It took me three years to come across a copy, but I finally read JPod. It was a big deal when it was published because it covers similar territory to Coupland’s fondly-remembered 1995 book Microserfs, and coincidentally came out at the same time as iPods were going vooosh. It’s one of Coupland’s funnier books, although the technological references already seem quaint. The main characters work for a game design company, and are hard to differentiate, but much of the dialogue is hilarious. It’s also hard to hate a book which is ostensibly derived from the contents of a purloined laptop, and devotes 26 pages to the first hundred thousand digits of π and 22 pages to the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000.
Trusty Wikipedia described as an “avant-garde novel”, which I think in this context means it’s like the White Album, giving exposure to already established avant-garde elements in a mainstream product. As in Microserfs, chapters are broken up with random computer ephemera, such as stray pop culture sentences, factoids, quotes, lists and straightfaced pieces of spam. The author also appears as an amoral deus ex machina version of himself, and the book’s manifesto is pretty much laid out on the first ‘dialogue’ page, when one of the characters states that they “feel like they’re a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.” It’s post-modernism, but thankfully with a sense of humour and an awareness of how awful it must sound.
Inevitably it was adapted and watered-down into a short-running sitcom, which sounds dreadful. There’s also a short film based on the book on the BookShorts website which features Macs, which I find funny just because you can tell the characters (who all exhibit traits of different, specific types of autism) would be more Linux inclined.
