JPod
Douglas Coupland Bloomsbury, 464pp, £12.99
ISBN 074758222X
Last year, Douglas Coupland spent several weeks chewing torn-up copies of his old books and refashioning the spit-and-paper mix as a series of hornets' nests. It was an art project, which he conducted in front of the TV. The results were exhibited under glass cases in a Toronto gallery, alongside similarly masticated dollar bills and Gideon Bibles. JPod seems to have been written in something of the same spirit. There is a lot in it that has been recycled, or regurgitated, from the author's previous work; in fact, he makes this self-reference a point of principle. "Oh God," says a nameless voice in an idea-free meeting room at the very outset. "I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel." "That asshole," says another. "Who does he think he is?"
Coupland knows exactly who he is, or what he has become. He is a professional zeitgeister, doomed by Generation X to have his senses primed for the already stale whiff of the new new thing. JPod is announced as "Microserfs for the age of Google", just as Microserfs, a decade ago, was Generation X for the age of dotcoms. In his original vision, borrowing the then fresh-minted lexicons of the digital age, Coupland fashioned an indelible weariness with the world and an addictive kind of attention deficit into an authentic new voice. Fifteen years on, his voice and those of his characters are little changed except that they are freighted with another decade and a half of channel-hopping and virtual reality. Their pop-culture references are now so impacted with private jokes and overdetermined trivia that nothing can be said or done without several sets of quote marks and recourse to a search engine. "I fucking hate Google," someone notes, quietly, 400 pages in.
JPod is a small division of a software corporation devoted to creating the ultimate skateboarding console game. The half-dozen designers and programmers are corralled in their padded cubicles, instant-messaging each other with ironies about brand names, sharing jpegs in lieu of conversation. Ethan, the junior of this team, whose main functions are to keep up the stock of Honey Nut Cheerios and class-A drugs, describes most of this from inside his own head, or at least from inside his own hard drive - it turns out that he has made a devil-at-the-crossroads pact with his author, who has several walk-on parts in the book. The pact involves him turning over his laptop to Coupland in exchange for an escape route from a Chinese sweatshop infected with a new Sars plague (it's a long story).
Ethan's tale, of his dope-dealing mother and his bicurious ballroom-dancing father, is an everyday drama of murdered bikers, insane refugee-smugglers and impromptu foursomes. It is punctuated with Coupland's riffs on the comical emptiness of corporate life and his now-familiar bag of typographical tricks: lots of Chinese characters writ large, reams of computer-generated prime numbers, all the three-letter Scrabble words under the sun, and so on. Despite his laboured radicalism, he can still be lots of fun when he gets going. The epigram is his ideal form: "Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise; it's just you." Or: "People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity."
He gets away with some of the rest of the babble by virtue of his ear for white noise. The free association is painstakingly layered with the voices that surround us: "User Name. Remember me? Password." And: "Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand." If the result has an organising theme, it is that his characters - and, this being the zeitgeist, all of us - are becoming progressively more "autistic", more locked into discrete information-saturated worlds, more "geeky". Ethan cries out for human contact: "I want to speak to a real person please." He falls in love with a colleague who installs her home-made hug machine in the office, to generate a bit of warmth.
While Coupland satirises this predicament, he also seems unable to escape from it. The double bind he has always faced in writing about the surfaces of contemporary life is that he can find no way to give them any depth. His efforts to make up for this emotional lack with his cleverness often verge on the heroic, without ever feeling quite enough. At times here he seems to want to moralise, albeit in a coolly self-defeating way, about Ethan's life. There is, at the heart of the book, an e-mail from "him" to his creation: "for the love of God, grow up. Or read something outside your normal sphere or use what few savings you have ($23,400.06, if your files are correct) and go to college or university and rebuild your hard drive . . . Doug." It is rather a desperate message in a bottle, though; and one thrown against the overwhelming drift of his novel.
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