When Ronald McDonald did dirty deeds

[Sean Mannion]

Hmmm..... It sounds as if Coupland is novelly trying to disguise the fact 
that he's just written the same novel for the fourth time. The quality of 
Coupland's fiction may have varied substantially, but the one or two basic 
ideas inhabiting almost every one of his novels - clunkily positioned and 
almost completely unvarnished - sure-as-shit haven't.

Did he reach the second half of the book only to realise the material wasn't 
strong enough to make his point by itself, therefore needing not just an 
intertext, but rather, the literary equivalent of placard denoting, 
'yeah....what he said - that's I mean too.' in block capitals.



>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: When Ronald McDonald did dirty deeds
>Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 06:13:14 -0700 (PDT)
>
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>
>
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>
>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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