If Douglas Coupland writes serious stuff, with characters we care about, talking about nature and God, some readers will be put off, as if he's being pretentious, so perhaps he has consciously opted to go glib this time 'round for jPod. For Douglas Coupland's 18th book since 1991, six young employees at a Vancouver computer game design company, all with surnames that start with J, share a work station. Hence the title, jPod. The six co-workers are quirky in their own way, but Coupland gives them a hasty writing style that blends them into puppets for his own humour. jPod comes complete with gag lines and preposterous events. From the outset, when the protagonist's mother, a West Vancouver matron, accidentally electrocutes a biker named Tim who has tried to extort her into giving him fifty percent of her marijuana crop and then the mother and son have to bury Tim in a nearby construction site atop the British Properties filled with "jumbo houses that resembled microwave ovens covered with cedar shake roofing,"; we know Coupland is not giving Leo Tolstoy a run for his roubles. When the people-smuggling brother of the protagonist Ethan asks him to look after his shipment of twenty, stick-thin, starving and unclean refugees from Fujian Province, Ethan forces his uncaring brother to at least get some Chinese take-out food while he orchestrates a "hygiene pageant"; for the unwanted guests. As the narrator Ethan, Coupland writes: "I got a conga line going in and out of the shower, and I put their dirty clothing in the washer and gave them my own clothes to wear. The hot water ran out quickly, but nobody seemed to mind. I felt like Elliott from E.T. handing out Reese's Pieces.";

If jPod strikes Coupland aficionados as suspiciously like the stewpot for Microserfs, Coupland's novel about employees at the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, well, hey, give the guy a break. That was, like, ten years ago. Three years later Coupland wrote Girlfriend in a Coma, in which characters were working together on Vancouver-based TV shows like The X-Files and Millennium. Perhaps jPod ought to be considered as the third work in a trilogy. Somehow we are making a leap from episodic television to episodic fiction, minus the laugh track. Some of Coupland's characters discuss how the author of Generation X, Douglas Coupland, really ought to sue the pants off of Aaron Spelling for making the characters on Melrose Place, a TV show, so similar to the characters in Coupland's breakthrough novel Generation X. Dozens of pages are filled with sequences of numbers or lists that nobody is going to read unless they are demented. This is either audaciously mind-bending or downright irritating. In terms of pacing, maybe these are the equivalents of commercial intermissions.
Amid the squibs of enlarged lettering for urgent poetry ("I smash your bones on rocks of ice churned by spews of cola.";) and info-breaks, we are treated to the following paragraph, in smaller type, for the entirety of page 142: Subway Restaurants is the world's largest submarine sandwich franchise, with more than 24,000 locations in 83 countries. In 2002, the Subway chain surpassed McDonald's in the number of restaurants open in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Milford, Conn., Subway Restaurants was co-founded by Fred DeLuca and Dr. Peter Buck in 1965. That partnership marked the beginning of a remarkable journey-one that made it possible for thousands of individuals to build and succeed in their own business. Subway Restaurants was named the number one franchise opportunity in all categories by Entrepreneur magazine-for the 13th time in 17 years! For more information about Subway restaurant chain, visit http://www.subway.com/. Subway is a registered trademark of Doctor's Associates Inc. (DAI).

Go figure. "Sleep is overrated,"; says closet math whiz Bree, "Everyone thinks that just because you have a nap, your life is fixed."; Anyone in this novel could have said that line, or about half the characters on TV, but even when Coupland is not at the top of his game, when it seems like he's dashing something off, or replicating himself, he is taking risks and generating something original. After Ethan retrieves his mother, who has disappeared to explore her femininity with lesbians during Uterus Week on the Sunshine Coast, Coupland inserts himself as a calculating capitalist who wants to hire the jPodders for his get-rich-quick scheme. The final page reads: Play again? Y/N.
"I know it's only rock 'n' roll,"; Mick Jagger sang, "but I like it."; If Douglas Coupland wants to reinvent his own brand of situation comedy, more power to him. At least he never commits the sin of being dull. jPod is unabashedly forgettable and often funny fiction for people who watch television a lot and use computers a lot. It's experimental, cutesy, 'edgy,' impressively clever in spots, padded in others, but ultimately charming in a disposable Friends sort of
way. 0-679-31424-5

[BCBW 2006]