Coupland's Clever Novel Gets Lost in Silliness
Written: Mar 27 '07 (Updated Mar 27 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Amusing characters. Witty prose. Accurately depicts cubicle life.
Cons: Sidetracked by silly family subplot.
The Bottom Line: A silly subplot nearly ruins the entire story, but JPod is clever and witty enough to make it an entertaining read.
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| briankrakow's Full Review: Douglas Coupland - JPod |
Douglas Coupland's Jpod is the perfect example of what can happen when an author gets sidetracked from his main premise. What could be an incisive novel about consumerism and pop culture gets lost in a sea of random events like dead bikers and drug deals gone bad. Coupland creates six very interesting main characters and their interactions are consistently hilarious. Thus, it baffles the mind why he needed to throw in extraneous "humorous" moments that are just far too silly. These moments ruin the comic momentum established in the rest of the novel.
Jpod focuses on the daily lives of employees for a game design company in Vancouver. The specific characters involved are stuck in a dead end cubicle environment known throughout the company as JPod. There is no escaping from JPod. When new hire Kaitlin attempts to contact HR, they tell her nothing can be done and she should make the best of it. And that's what the group of JPodders do. Led by the novel's narrator Ethan Jarlewski, they participate in a series of office games that make their daily lives much more tolerable. Ethan is in fact proud of himself when he's able to waste time at work. When he accidentally begins discussing company business on the phone, he says he "accidentally got sidetracked".
Coupland's attention to detail is very impressive. He perfectly captures the feel of helplessness in a mundane office job. His depictions of upper management's foibles hit close to home for anyone who has dealt with supervisors that have no realistic connection with their own product, yet act like experts in the field. As the JPod crew embark on the making of a new skateboarding game, a new boss directs them to include a turtle character because his son loves turtles. Coupland draws a sharp comparison between the knowledgeable office workers against the management who comes up with illogical decisions. Later, management directs them to base the turtle character’s personality on Survivor host Jeff Probst. The exasperation of Ethan and his friends is hilarious and disturbingly accurate.
Coupland has a few clever ways of getting us to quickly know the characters. At one point, Ethan tries to settle a fight by writing up a quick bio of each of the office workers. The bio includes important information such as preferred room temperature, preferred Simpsons character, and most disturbing trait. Coupland posts the actual bios as Ethan has written them in list format. It's almost like Coupland is sharing his character sketches with us. Later on, as a prank, each of them writes a sexually explicit letter to Ronald McDonald explaining why he should sleep with them. We get to see each of the letters as written by the characters, each of them even more hilarious than the last. This unique style is used throughout the book, as we get to read hilarious spam e-mails, random notepad lists, Doritos ingredients, and annoying mandates from management.
The characters in Jpod are very interesting. Aside from Ethan, there is the bitter Kaitlin, wannabe slut Bree, faux-suicidal Cowboy, freakishly neat Mark, and the aspiring to be average John Doe. Most of the characters are defined by what they want to be, not who they really are. Coupland uses these characters to make his attacks on consumerism, but is also making a stinging point about the hypocrisy of the JPodders. At the same time they attack Subway, McDonald's, Survivor, Coca-Cola, eBay and many others, they are participating in the very same world. This is definitely a pop culture savvy crowd, who could go toe to toe with anyone in a trivia contest. Coupland realizes you can't really attack consumerism without going after the consumer as well.
Unfortunately, Jpod gets sidetracked several times with silliness involving Ethan's family. His mother accidentally kills a biker, and Ethan helps her dispose of the body. Later on, she gets involved into the office life by showing up unannounced at an important meeting. Ethan also accompanies her on an attempt to collect money from a couple of stoners. Ethan's father is a low rent actor dating a younger girl, who went to high school with Ethan. These stories take us outside the realm of the claustrophobic office atmosphere in which the rest of the book exists. Coupland himself seems uneasy writing these subplots, as the usual wit he displays throughout Jpod is decidedly absent. Unfortunately, these subplots become more and more pronounced throughout and really hamper the overall story.
Coupland is also occasionally a little too clever for his own good. There are a few moments in Jpod where he writes about himself in third person, as the characters talk about him, usually trashing his previous novels. Allowing himself to be trashed may be a method of making it seem less egotistical, but it doesn't really work. He involves himself far too much in the story and it’s more distracting than clever. There are also a few moments where Mark plays a word or number search game. For example, he prints out a list of prime numbers and offers a prize for whoever can locate the number that is not prime. The list of numbers takes up 15 pages of the novel. While funny at first, Coupland repeats the joke several times throughout the book with other games and the joke begins to wear thin.
Coupland had some really great material here. His attacks on pop culture are sharp and hit their target more often than not. The depiction of the cubicle life as a jail sentence is humorous and all too genuine. The thin narrative has enough surprises to keep it humming along at a good pace, and Coupland's dry prose is consistently witty. Jpod loses focus too often for it to be considered a complete success, but there is enough great material here to make it a worthy read.
Recommended:
Yes
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briankrakow
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Member: Larry McGillicuddy
Location: Atlanta, GA
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