Fiction: In Microserfs, published in 1995, Douglas Coupland captured perfectly the pale-grey, everything-is-synthetic blandness of life in the IT industry, the vividness of his writing providing a built-in counterpoint to the homogenised world it described. With Jpod he proves once again he's the ace chronicler of the techno-times, writes Cathy Dillion.
The blurb says Jpod is "Microserfs for the Google generation" and it is, though it's inevitable that it doesn't quite have the same freshness this time round. It has shades, too, of Coupland's brilliant breakthrough novel-with-graphics, Generation X (1991), and your response to it will partly depend on your toleration for postmodern tricksiness such as copy-and-paste snippets in different fonts, a whole page devoted to the writing on a Doritos package and the fact that Coupland himself is a character in the novel.
The opening stream-of-consciousness rant, punctuation and paragraph free and in bold, pretty much sums up IT life after the dotcom collapse. It is blackly funny as well as bleak, and ends with a page and three quarters of repeated dollar signs followed by a full page of lines repeating the words "ramen noodles". (If this makes you laugh you are in the right place.) Dodgy money scam e-letters in quaint almost-English from Nigeria and Russia are reproduced in full and in one enjoyable section the main characters discuss the strange and possibly actionable resemblance between the premise of the novel Generation X and the TV series Melrose Place.
The Jpod is a group of computer geeks, all of whom have a last name that begins with the letter J and all of whom have become stranded in a grim workpod on the edge of a game software development company in Vancouver. Two of the geeks are women, which as one of them, Kaitlin, points out (in a rather contrived way), is unusual - geekdom is generally a male thing. But a novel about only male nerds would probably be unbearable and having females in the group offers the possibility of (heterosexual) romance. They are all very smart and cling to irony like a life raft in their materially comfortable, sexually free alienation. This is not just life after God but at the end of Nature, and unlike their predecessors these characters seem to have given up any attempt to follow EM Forster's "only connect" advice.
Ethan, the narrator, is a variation on Coupland's other male "heroes" - clever, mild-mannered and burdened with well-meaning but muddled, in this case violent, parents. The geeks are working on an action game which is about to be ruined by their production manager, who is insisting on the addition of a kid-friendly turtle character.
Eventually he sabotages the original idea completely and the group has to transform what was a skateboard game into a twee fantasy. In retaliation for this and their general corporate-drone powerlessness they work on secretly programming a serial-killing Ronald McDonald-style clown into the naff game just before it goes into production.
Outside the Jpod, things are turning gloriously bizarre. Ethan's family are the source of most of the turmoil: his brother is involved in human trafficking, his mother has a cannabis farm in the basement of their house and has accidentally killed one of her customers, and his father, a movie extra with a fetish for ballroom dancing, is having an affair with a girl who was in Ethan's class at high school.
After Steve, the podsters' production manager disappears, Ethan ends up travelling to China to find him and on the plane meets Douglas Coupland. He strikes up a drunken conversation and wakes up later to receive a ticking off from the irascible writer (left in a Word document on his laptop of course). Among other things, Coupland criticises Ethan for allowing a total stranger free access to his computer ("Are you a f**king idiot?") and his choice of porn - "Cheerleaders? How vanilla." (In fact, extreme and violent pornography is now so ubiquitous that Ethan's choice of naked cheerleaders is designed to confirm him as a basically wholesome guy.)
The China section wears its research on its sleeve. It's not that the description of the country doesn't convince - the polluted air and communist-era architecture are well evoked, it's just that they seem like they were inserted from a file named Shanghaiobservations.doc as soon as Coupland returned from his fact-finding mission. Putting a version of himself in the story is a cute twist (inevitably, this has brought accusations of egotism but in his defence the character is not a likeable one.)
As it progresses it becomes increasingly clear that the story is just a rollercoaster that carries the zeitgeisty gimmicks and themes and it twists and turns in impossible ways in order to allow Coupland comment on modern life. He covers the gamut: the economic rise of China; globalisation and sweatshop labour; the over-processing of food; e-Bay; drugs.
Steve is eventually found working in a fake Nike factory in China, strung out on heroin. At one point, one of the characters bemoans the advent of Google and the fact that any information about anything is just a click away - "I think by the year 2020 people are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless". And there's the fact that the disconnected nature of modern life extends to a lack of physical touching: Kaitlin builds a "hugging machine" for the pod because she believes most computer geeks suffer from a mild form of autism but argues that their aversion to non-sexual touch is just a little further along a sliding scale than is considered normal.
One of the pod has been brought up in a lesbian hippie commune and copes with this by striving for normality in all aspects of his life. His real name is crow well mountain juniper (all lower case - capitalisation, even of letters, being considered hierarchical and patriarchal) but he has adopted the name John Doe and attempts to be as average as possible in all things, which of course makes him seriously weird. When his ebullient and very butch mother, freedom, shows up out of the blue at a work gathering, all John's dialogue suddenly appears in a tiny typesize, which brilliantly captures his complete mortification. It's a moment where Coupland's talent as a visual artist meets his writing and it's very funny.
As someone who was working in Microsoft when Microserfs was published, I remember the exhilaration of seeing that life or a version of it captured. Fifteen years on, Coupland, now in his 40s, appears to have nailed the reality of the next generation of serfs. In the interim his slacker style has been much copied (Dave Eggers, among others, seems to have learned a lot). It should be said that if you don't do irony or pop culture JPod will probably leave you baffled, and his less techie fans might prefer the more traditional novels - Shampoo Planet rather than Generation X, Eleanor Rigby rather than this - but as a chronicler of the techno-times Coupland is pretty much still out on his own.
Cathy Dillon is an Irish Times journalist
Jpod. By Douglas Coupland. Bloomsbury, 449pp. £12.99