Meet Jeff, the skateboarding turtle
July 8th, 2006 Molly - Central
Hey, Douglas Coupland! Is that you three cubes down from me? ‘Cause it is eerie how much you know about the work environment of an information professional. JPod, the newest offering by the literary creator that popularized Gen-X, tells the tale of a software animation team stuck between the throes of computer genius, the social oddities of “cube life” and outrageous family/personal drama.
Grouped together because their last names all begin with the letter “J”, the JPod group struggles with the complexities of trying to insert an insipid turtle character into an edgy skateboard game at the eleventh hour and maintain some sort of individual identity not tied to the Vancouver software company where they spend 18 hours of their day.
Microserfs was Coupland’s first foray into techno-geek territory; if you enjoyed that novel, JPod marches one decade further into the future. The pop culture snippets and computer error message/spam email filler pages are bitingly funny. If you rank the chronology of Coupland titles with Generation X, Shampoo Planet, and Microserfs at the top, add JPod to the list.
Entry Filed under: Recreational Fiction
5 Comments Add your own
1. Sarah | July 8th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Oh, I’m so pumped for this one. I LOVED Microsefs; also enjoyed Eleanor Rigby on some weird level. JPod’s been getting such terrible reviews! So I’m glad you liked it.
2. Molly | July 8th, 2006 at 8:37 am
I really did like it - I felt rather eh about Life After God, Polaroids from the Dead and Girlfriend in a Coma. Miss Wyoming sorta, kinda swung me back around again, but this one had me totally hooked.
3. Sarah | July 8th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Ha, “rather eh”! I’m going to try and work that into all my conversations about books, as well as life in general.
(I mean, not good that you felt “rather eh” about his other books, just a great phrase.)
4. Liz | July 10th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Funny about Shampoo Planet… I REALLY didn’t like it at the time… but now my hubbie has literally 6 bottles of shampoo all going at once and I feel like maybe I was too quick to critique (negatively) his cultural touchstones in that one. I’ll try JPod.
(Did you read Big If by Mark Costello? It was/is shockingly prescient about an online, realtime game that seems to be happening now, 4 years later, in the form of Runescape.)
5. dan | July 13th, 2006 at 5:57 am
well…I loved microserfs, in fact I still read it every so often. I’m halfway through jpod and realize that I’m not liking it that much. It seems that Coupland has just rehashed an idea (I can think you could come up with different names for people) and some of the stuff in the book just seems like he kept the same format. Oh well… maybe I’ll be reposting a message saying I loved the end of the book.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed