Fiction 01 Oct 2007 03:11 pm
JPod
JPod
Douglas Coupland
The back cover of this book proclaims it is “Microserfs for the Google generation”, and it might well be… but I feel it was badly done if that was the intention.
The odd thing is, it looks like “Microserfs”, but the magic is simply not there. I’m not sure whether this says more about me or about the author, though. The basic story is similar: a group of young geeks working together for a company interact with each other and with their families, and mature (somehow) in the process. It is much more surreal than “Microserfs”, however… it feels much less connected to reality, and it loses much of its appeal because of that. The characters do not feel real.
And a few things were plainly annoying. To begin with, the characters live in Vancouver but refer to temperatures in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. And there are several references to “56K floppies”, which simply do not exist (there are 56K modems). And the first time there are tens of pages filled with digits, it’s interesting; the third time, it’s irritating. Plus, using the author as a character was even more irritating, especially when the other characters keep comparing themselves to “characters in a Doug Coupland novel”; I mean, can you be any less subtle?
In a word: disappointing. But perhaps I had set my expectations too high.
