When Ronald McDonald did dirty deeds

[Dave Monroe]

When Ronald McDonald did dirty deeds

Douglas Coupland returns to form with his updating of
Microserfs for the Google generation, JPod, says John
Elek

Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer

JPod
by Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury £12.99, pp449

Douglas Coupland is neither a master of plot, nor of
characterisation. However, when on form, he is
possibly the most gifted exegete of North American
mass culture writing today. Since his remarkable
debut, the era-defining Generation X (1991), the
quality of Coupland's fiction has varied
substantially. But JPod is without a doubt his
strongest, best-observed novel since Microserfs
(1995), to which it is a kind of sequel.

JPod follows the lives of six drones who work together
at a nameless gaming corporation on the outskirts of
Vancouver. Ethan, a programmer on the eve of 30,
suffers from a noticeable lack of 'overriding
purpose'. As if to compensate for this, he and his
similarly unanchored co-workers surround themselves
with the disjecta membra of a late-capitalist
electronic age: junk food, spam, eBay, breakfast
cereals, BlackBerries, C++, karaoke, The Simpsons and
so on....



[...]

In the second half of the book, Ethan becomes involved
in the purchase of a property known as Lot 49. This
unsubtle allusion to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of
Lot 49 provides a useful insight into Coupland's sense
of purpose. Ethan is effectively a latterday Oedipa
Maas, trying to make sense of an overfed, depthless
culture in which everyone else, it seems, is mad. As
with Pynchon, Coupland's world teems with data: we may
not know what to make of it, but it is, nevertheless,
on some level, a coded attempt to communicate....

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1779649,00.html

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