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June 20, 2006
JPod - Douglas Coupland
It's a really long time since I read Generation X
Having just completed JPod, I'm reasonably sure that it's pretty much the same stuff, slightly repackaged to include the new internet themes and memes.
Ethan works in an office for a computer game company. We're supposed to think he's a pretty normal geek in the beginning. He has the stereotypical cubicle life. He gets great company perks like free food and drinks, and very flexible hours. He calls his block of cubicles JPod, as everyone's surname begins with J. There are 5 main colleagues, all with odd quirks.
But Ethan's life is weird. All his family and friends are weird, and he happily gets caught up in all their illegal activities. I think we're supposed to find this amusing, like the way John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are funny hitmen in Pulp Fiction. But I just found the weirdness distastful and not very original. It goes on a bit too long as well, and like a soap opera, you can see the set-ups coming for miles.
It's written in an easy style which will have you moving through at 100 pages an hour if you're not careful. Of course, having pages and pages of prime numbers and digits of pi adds a lot to the thickness of the book, and very little to the interestingness.
Geeks will love all the overt references to Google, Nigerian spam, Blackberries and the multitude of other things they are daily exposed to. You get the feeling that Coupland really understands this world. He knows that dissecting a geek's laptop will expose just about everything you need to know about his life. I'm a card carrying geek myself and enjoyed that I understood most of the archane 8 bit computer talk, that I knew Belgian keyboards are hell to use, that I know what a rendering farm is. A few years back I was reading a Scott Adams Dilbert book, and was laughing my head off. My mum was there, and I showed her the passage - she has never worked in an office and the humour just didn't work on her. I think JPod is the same.
If you're not into the whole eBay, Quake, C++ world, if you think a computer is just a tool, and not a life choice, then I think you'll be turned off fairly quickly by this book. If like me you spend the day wondering what piece of software you could upgrade or reconfigure instead of doing any real work, then you'll find it a fun read, but you will be unconvinced by the actual story, and you won't care at all about the characters or what happens to them.
I even bought the limited edition, which comes signed by the author, and has a little JPod plastic figure. Nice marketing.
Posted by se71 at June 20, 2006 10:37 AM
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