Coupland, Douglas - jPod

Please excuse the pretension, but Douglas Coupland seemed so much more clever when I was 19.

Take, for instance, an interview where he describes ordering a diet Coke, only to sit at his table, dumping packet after packet of C&H sugar into his fizzing glass. It’s a typical Coupland anecdote, one designed to elicit a wry smile, one designed for greater meaning. It’s a comment on consumerism, but also on our society as a whole.

Really, though, when you think about it, it’s kind of dumb.

This is not to say that Douglas Coupland is not a talented writer. Even his lesser novels pull the reader in. In Eleanor Rigby, the main character is an overweight and anonymous woman who’s personality is drawn with considerable skill. Life After God is my favorite Coupland novel to date primarily because he limits himself to his writing: no clever gimmicks or otherworldly plotlines.

And that is not to say that gimmickry is a bad thing. When done correctly, a print trick or story twist can be remarkably effective. For example: the marginal notes in Coupland’s signature Generation X and use of the copyright page as a story-telling tool in Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

jPod, Coupland’s latest novel, is filled with these tricks, and they come off contrived and a bit obnoxious. 22 pages are devoted to the number pi. Advertisements are laid out in large font on entire pages. The worst trick is the introduction of Coupland as a character in his own novel. The first line of the book is innocent enough, “‘Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel’”, but the act wears thin with each reference.

Coupland’s subject matter is ambitious. jPod is his first novel to step away from Generation X and into Y. I sit precariously on the X/Y border and enjoy any discussion of the defining traits of my generation, especially from a writer who practically defined his.

The focus is not as broad as it sounds, however. Coupland’s Y-ers, like the X-ers in Microserfs, are computer geeks (in this case, video game programmers) stuck in a purgatorial cubicle colony nicknamed jPod. Each of the pod inhabitants, as one of them discovers, exhibit symptoms of autism. Maybe it’s because of this, but the jPodders seem suspiciously similar to Generation X.

The same day that I bought the book, I caught a story on NPR about Generation Y-ers entering the job market. You can listen to the piece here. Some of the concepts that define the newest generation range from a higher focus on family and community to the desire to “work to live” as opposed to “live to work” (as a member of Generation Y, I might more accurately define these traits as laziness and a sense of entitlement).

Coupland’s characters work Industrial Revolution-era hours, but their community is fairly broad, primarily focused on the jPod team and colorful array of outsiders. It’s within this community that Coupland scratches the surface of his most interesting topic.

Story-wise, Coupland’s characters inhabit a moral ambiguity: the narrator’s mother is unfailingly gracious, but she also keeps genetic charts for her marijuana plot, kills a member of a biker gang, and leaves her husband to experiment with lesbianism. Their boss becomes a heroin addict after being kidnapped and sent to China by another primary character, a sociopathic Asian mob boss considered a close friend of the jPodders.

None of these transgressions or personalities receive an inch of judgment, even in the subtext. On the contrary, each of the characters above is portrayed as lovable and sweetly eccentric. It’s in this gray morality that Coupland comes closest to hitting the nail on the head. Perhaps it was the attempt by right-wing pundits to discredit Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities, or perhaps it’s reaction to Conservative Christian lobbyists/pastors striving to turn Judeo-Christian ethics into law (the characters pay no interest to politics or bigger issues), but the Generation Y-ers Coupland paints are almost completely amoral.

Coupland doesn’t denounce or support this perception. His character, in fact, serves to give the jPodders a worthy focus for their talent in the end. The discussion here is interesting, and will receive more commentary in the future as Generation Y-ers gain further cultural prominence. There appears to be a trade-off between morality and judgment that is difficult to toe (Paul’s letters to the Corinthians would be an example).

I have to admit that while jPod didn’t offer the depth of some of Douglas Coupland’s earlier work or of other books I’ve recently picked up, it was an enjoyable read. It has to be difficult to maintain his legendary pop culture status, but I think Coupland would be better served to rely on his skilled prose rather than blockbuster schemes.