The only book that I have read that is only ever so slightly worse than this one is Confederacy of Dunces which I was forced to put down without reading the whole thing.
This edition of Coupland's Generation X franchise is about a group of people working at a sports game software developer in Vancouver, a thinly veiled reference to Electronic Arts. The reason it is called jPod is that the last name of all five of the employees sitting in this particular pod of desks begins with J.
The main character in the book is Ethan, a nerdy C++ programer, whose father has given up his real job in a futile effort to land a speaking role in a movie, whose mother has a surprisingly high tech and productive home based grow operation and whose brother is a highly paid realtor catering to the Asian community. His four other pod mates are also programers and suffer from similarly unbelievable families. And, coincidentally, all of the jPod-ers families have large grow ops. The story, if you can call it that, is about Ethan's life at work, his interaction with his parents and with an ironically friendly Asian criminal who smuggles people and drugs to and from Hong Kong and China.
Now let me tell you why this book is so bad:
1. The author incorporates himself into the book, at first by strange third person references to himself and then as a character in the book. He begins by inserting a paragraph claiming that the idea for the show Melrsoe Place was stolen from his book Generation X and suggesting that the producers of the show should pay him or that he should sue them. He then inserts a dialog about how Douglas Coupland is so cool and cutting edge. He moves on by inserting himself as a character that Ethan meets on a flight to Shanghai and re-inserts himself by bumping into Ethan in rural Guangxho Province.
2. The book is 500 pages long but could easily be 300 pages long because the author has inserted about 200 pages of useless information into the book. For example, the jPod-ers are discussing Scrabble, one of them comes up with a list of the 900 possible three letter words that one can use in Scrabble and Coupland then spends the next 40 pages listing out the words. Or, the jPod-ers are having a conversation when one of them says that he has found a web site that shows pi to the millionth decimal place. Coupland spends the next 90 pages showing pi to the millionth digit.
3. It is a fundamentally badly researched and poorly put together book. There is no depth to the characters or their lives and what depth there is, is absolutely unbelievable.
All copies of this book should be incinerated and the author should be exiled from Vancouver, he gives the place a bad name.
4 comments:
Wow. I thought Microserfs was a lot of fun, but I guess DC has lost his touch.
Thanks for jumping on that grenade. I heard him the other day on the radio discussing this book and and he said that the incessant pages of text and numbers were art. He seemed to find it quite humorous that he had inserted an incorrect digit into pi and substituted an O for a 0 somewhere. What bullshit.
I haven't read anything of his since X and I think I read microserfs. There's no accounting for how he has become this global figure in pop culture. I find both his writing and his art superficial.
Well hold on now. That book sounds like utter bullshit (is it truly 40 and 90 pages of scrabble letters and pi?!), but Douglas Coupland has done a lot of interesting and important work in strengthening a confident Canadian culture. His two coffee table books on Canada are quite good, as was his toy exhibit. It's all a bit pretentious, but I think he has (or had) an important role to play.
ouch and ouch and ouch.
thanks for the headsup. I probably wasn't going to read it and noow I definitely won't.
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