---
author: marco
categories:
- Books
date: "2007-01-24T13:14:43Z"
title: jPod (D. Coupland)
---

jPod is the kind of book that makes me feel very ambivalent: lots of promise, but a lot of annoyance going along with it. In this, it reminds me of {moscontentlink:Eggers}: an ambitious novel, some excellent writing, but a lot of stuff that is completely unrelated to the main thread. In other words: it could have been a great book, but its shortcomings make it just enjoyable.   
 The story line follows a bunch of game developers whose last names start with the letter J – they are all placed in neighboring cubicles in a forced cohabitation from which they cannot escape. The jPodders are very different from each other, and their families play active roles in the novel.

It’s about a murder, about a Chinese immigrant smuggler ring, about game development and game development companies, and about Vancouver, B.C. Douglas Coupland, who amused me beyond means with his earlier novel, *Microserfs*, moved to B.C. and gives us an interesting view of his own surroundings.   
 Mr. Coupland’s skill as a writer is obvious, and nothing has been lost in the move. Success stories like *Microserfs* and *Generation X* are not flukes, and the writing in *jPod* flows superbly. The story line is coherent and works pretty well. So what’s the hangup?   
 *jPod* suffers from two major flaws: its characters, much in line with other Coupland books, are caricatures of themselves. You can stick a label onto each one of them, and the character will not deviate, a Borg drone in a Coupland novel.   
 The second issue is an innovative narrative device that just doesn’t work at all: Douglas Coupland inserts himself into the book as an active character. Initially, that’s by simple remote reference: “You are behaving like a character in a Douglas Coupland novel.” Later, the main character and first person narrator will meet Coupland on a plane. Even later, Coupland will create a startup and hire everyone in jPod, except the narrator into it.   
 I am not sure what Mr. Coupland was trying to accomplish, but it sounds terribly contrived and horribly self-serving. Maybe there was an attempt to be innovative, but I am pretty sure this is the kind of innovation that goes hand in hand with human cloning and therrmonuclear war. To paraphrase a successful Nike slogan: Just Don’t Do It.