J-Pod by Douglas Coupland

A few years ago my sister bouht me a Douglas Coupland book for Christmas and I remember it being very enjoyable. The writing style was quirky and off beat, the humour dark and weird, the stories rooted in urbane everyday life with a twist. I remember going out and buying as many DC books as I could afford and for about a year I became a bit of a fanboy. My favourite of the time was Microserfs, a fun look at thwat the working habits of the technology boomers was like, very Gap and Microsoft, but also very fun.

Eventually I lost heart and moved onto better things. But just recently I noticed he had a new(ish) book out that touted itself as the succesor of Microserfs so I thought I’d give it a try. It revolves around the seemingly mundane existence of a group of game developers working almost forgotten in a big game company and focuses on the “hero”, Ethan. It starts off normally but quickly disintegrates into an unbeleivable farce made worse by the random introduction of a new character halfway through the book, none other than the seemingly egocentric Douglas Coupland himself. At the time I thopught it was a funny aside to the book, why not give yourself a cameo in your own book? But when he goes on to be a secondary character for the rest of the book it added the shit cherry to the steaming bowl of bowel trifle that is an excuse for this book. Couplands ability to capture the Zeitgeist that he was so famous for in Generation X and Girlfriend in a Coma has vanished and he now feels like the equivalent of a seventies hippy guru trying to reinent himself in modern day.

A trick too far/10