JPod by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is one of my favorite authors. His wit and style are just terrific. JPod is another in the Coupland line of fine books, but I worry that he might need to start spreading his wings a bit before he becomes a genre unto himself.

Anyhow, JPod is about Ethan Jarlewski and his co-workers in JPod who work for a computer game company in Vancouver. The book starts by Ethan getting an call from his mom at work and asking him to come over to her house. It's then that we find out that she has a marijuana growing operation in her basement (which Ethan knew all about). What was unexpected to Ethan is that his mom killed a biker in the basement. And, if you can believe it, the story just gets weirder from there. In a over-the-top Vonnegut-esque way, Coupland actually writes himself into the story. It's hard to tell if the Coupland in the book is the villain or the savior (which is kind of the point).

The best part of JPod, as in most Coupland books, is the dialog. The discussions between Ethan and his podmates capture a good deal of the inanity of working life and life in general in the 21st Century. It also shows how intelligent and creative people behave when put in a stifling environment. Another interesting thing Coupland does is with the formatting of the book. Interspersed with the story are chunks of seemingly random text (which are actually things you see everyday, whether it's on the web, on a box of staples, on the nutritional panel of a bag of Doritos, about 21 pages of pi out to a hundred thousand digits, etc.). This is actually perhaps the most interesting point of the book because it's stream-of-consciousness in a much more intriguing manner. It shows how we're victims of information overload in so many ways that just media saturation. He even makes it so that these everyday intrusions even interfere with that most single-minded pursuit, reading a book.

In all, a very good book, even by Coupland's lofty standards. I'd put it right up there with my favorites, Hey, Nostradamus and Miss Wyoming. Much, much better than his previous book, Eleanor Rigby.