jPOD
By Douglas Coupland
Random House Canada, 517 pages, $34.95
jPod is a seriously funny book. In the past, Douglas Coupland's fictions (this is his 11th novel) have been intermittently hilarious, but jPod is a rolling thunder of sustained comedy, first page to last, as it sends up and skewers the shamelessness and amorality that define our era. Mordecai Richler employed a sharp satirist's scalpel in Cocksure to dissect corporate boneheads, greed-driven marketers and sexual wastrels in the conglomerate-fuelled, celebrity-driven publishing and movie-making worlds of the Swinging Sixties. In much the same way, Coupland targets the ever more vacuous and vicious people who control and market the computer games that are redefining the faces and formulae of mass entertainment in the first decade of the new millennium. As with Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), Coupland's timing is impeccable: jPod is the right book at the right time, an early warning of what lies beyond the bend of the dead man's economic curve we're currently riding.
Ethan Jarlewski and his five co-workers (whose first or last names all begin with a J) are "jPod," a team of software geeks working on an innovative game for a massive Vancouver video-design company. When Steve, the new head of marketing, insists that Ethan and his crew "retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle," a classic situation is set up. The rules of marketing must be obeyed in defiance of logic and consumer taste, because Steve "took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."
The question is: Can Ethan's ill-assorted coterie of dysfunctional underdogs find enough focus to rise up and bite the hands that feed them by turning that turtle into something far more dangerously reptilian? (This turtle and much else of interest can be viewed on-line at www.jpod.info.) The author has described his protagonist as "non-Doug," and Ethan is distinctly different from any of Coupland's previous narrators. Ethan is very, very smart, a lot of fun and utterly convincing in his capacity to see himself as behaving normally while everyone around him is "going random." As he says, "I look at most people like recently lit Roman candles, unsure if they're about to go off, or if they're merely duds."
Until Steve's arrival, Ethan's greatest workplace challenge was "to have a job without actually doing work, which is relatively hard to pull off in a company where workspace productivity is measured with just about every conceivable form of metrics." His principal coping mechanism is to distract his co-workers from their jobs by issuing truly inspiring techno-challenges of his own.
Ethan is very much like Coupland in his deep and abiding fascination with mass culture for its abundance of images, and simply revels in its powers of replication. Among a host of other delights in a visually astonishing book, jPod contains printouts (with intentional errors embedded) of pi to a 100,000 digits, the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 and the 972 three-letter words permitted in Scrabble because Evil Mark Jackson, a co-member of the pod, wants to out-Ethan Ethan and out-source Steve.
