Life After Google
Douglas Coupland's sort-of sequel to Microserfs has videogame programmers, basement grow-ops, human smugglers, marzipan staplers plus pages and pages of numerology and some cracking good dialogue, reports Ryan Bigge
From the Toronto Star, May 7, 2006
jPod by Douglas Coupland, Random House, 518 pages, $34.95
Apparently, it's Douglas Coupland's world. We just live in it:
"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."
"That asshole."
"Who does he think he is?"
"Come on guys, focus. We've got a major problem on our hands."
Thus begins jPod, a novel about videogame programmers, rogue businessmen, the metastasizing Chinese economy, basement grow-ops, human smugglers, marital infidelity, karaoke mistakes and marzipan staplers. It's an ambitious, sprawling and indulgent book, the literary equivalent of a double album.
This is not necessarily a complaint. Coupland's febrile, pop- rocks-n-cola imagination spatters across every visible surface of jPod. Taking inspiration from contemporaries such as Brett Easton Ellis (Lunar Park) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated), Coupland even test-drives the postmodern trick du jour and sporadically inserts himself into his own novel, replete with a Doug ex Machina ending. Along the way he pokes some fun at himself.
Unfortunately, if you assembled all the kooks in this novel into a police lineup, the least convincing character appears to be the one named Douglas Coupland. But that's okay. Tucked inside these 500- odd pages is a little bit of meta-something for everyone.
If you don't like the author cameos, then maybe you'll appreciate the fake spam emails. Or personal ads in the style of eBay. Or reprints of college learning annex assignments. At one point in the novel, a handful of video game programmers compete to see who can spot the lone erroneous digit in a printout of the first 100,000 digits of pi. Coupland publishes all 23 pages for our edification. Here is a thrilling excerpt from that irrational, infinite decimal:
91338205784928006982551957402018181056412972508360703568510553317878408 29000041552511865779453963317538532092149720526607831260281961164858098 68458752512999740409279768317663991465538610893758795221497173172813151 79329044311218158710235187407572221001237687219447472093493123241070650 80618562372526732540733324875754482967573450019321902199119960797989373 38367324257610393898534927877747398050808001
This is not the only instance of wanton tree massacre. Twenty- four pages of jPod are devoted to a list of 58,894 random numbers; four pages display all 972 three-letter words recognized by Scrabble and then there's an 18-page roll call of every prime number between 10,000 and 100,000. (One can only wonder what prevented Coupland from reprinting his favourite Sudoku puzzles.)
Unlike other mainstream experimental writers, Coupland appears to insert this strange branch of numerology simply because it looks nifty. In comparison, Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close includes photographs of doorknobs and astronauts, along with red pen editing marks and a black, blotchy textual palimpsest - all heavy with Deeper Meaning. Neither Coupland nor Foer is entirely successful, but they fail for very different reasons. In his constant invention, Coupland often overlooks intention and the reader is left to wonder whether the nutritional information of Doritos Rollitos is made profound when reprinted in hardcover. (Short answer no.)
There are plenty of other examples of voluntary product placement in jPod, with a significant cluster of plot points revolving around Monsieur McDonald, including a secret videogame version of the clown gone wild. ("I am Ronald of Mordor, the Mage, the Destroyer ... In my costume of yellow bib and coarse enormous red feet, I will smite you with burgers laced with thorns.")
Coupland even creates pop culture poetry when he writes:
a pair of oversize
green foam latex
Incredible
Hulk
boxing
gloves
with built-in
Hulk
Noises
(I pity the person assigned to convert this into an audio book.)
This PowerPoint trickery is reminiscent of his own 1995 novel of software coding geeks, Microserfs, and Coupland admitted in a recent Quill and Quire interview that his eureka moment for jPod occurred after re-reading said novel, which he immodestly describes as an "incredibly funny f***ing book." jPod is a sequel of sorts, in which Coupland describes our age of information overload as managed and unmanaged by Google.
At one point, the ubiquitous search engine is compared with God "The problem is, after spending a week of googling, we're starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless."
As with Google, this novel sometimes confuses information with wisdom. Still, the sheer quantity of cultural detritus comprising this pop culture jambalaya is impressive.
The best moments in the novel are the dense preambles to each of the three sections, a tapestry of slogans, aphorisms and management jargon woven into an impressive denouement of a culture of self- help, self-improvement and self-absorption. Putting the jPod on shuffle we get:
If a discussion of character and plot has been conspicuously absent, that is because it is the least successful (and necessary) part of this novel. jPod describes a small acreage of cubicle farm - in what sounds suspiciously like Vancouver's video game-making factory, Electronic Arts - where six employees all have last names that begin with "J".
Coupland uses these misfits to explore the Asperger Syndrome sufferers who make our programmed conveniences possible. The story is told mostly through Ethan Jarlewski, a 30-year-old who likes Kettle Chips and dislikes humidity. Suffice to say, his family is a colourful car wreck and mayhem ensues.
This novel is indebted to The Simpsons, a show in which anything is possible. Let's send Ethan to China! Let's have his mother snuff a Hells Angel!
A sitcom has premises; a novel has themes. If you want textured human beings, I recommend Hari Kunzru's Transmission, a lyrical and satirical look at computer viruses and the hot air of branding strategies. Where Kunzru creates quirky characters you care about, Coupland creates life-sized puppets to further his ventriloquist act. Thankfully, Coupland's dialogue remains, as always, a treat. Here is Kaitlin, Ethan's love interest, attacking her co-workers:
"You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete - whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you."
Hey, she said it, not me.
The biggest problem with jPod is not that it's overlong and occasionally undisciplined, but that the actual video gaming and coding is faint background rain. Given the cultural impact of the blip-zap-pong, Coupland could have pushed himself into new territory and written Generation X-Box. Instead, jPod reads as a sort of Microserfs 2.01, and thus suffers the same fate that every sequel does - the original did it better and did it first.
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