Name: JPod
Rating: 3.54 (50 reviews)
ISBN: 9781596911055

Douglas Coupland

Trapped in the bureaucratic morass of JPod, on the fringes of a huge Vancouver video-game-design company, Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers wage a daily war with the demands of the company's idiotic marketing department, while Ethan's own life is molded by Hollywood, marijuana operations, people smuggling, ballroom dancing, and China. Reprint.

JPod

Ethan and his five co-workers are marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive game-design company. There they wage battle against the demands of boneheaded marketing staff who torture them with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is being invaded by marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, global piracy and the rise of China. Everybody in both worlds seems to inhabit a moral grey zone, and nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly strait-laced parents or Coupland himself…

ikkychan

Just finished reading “Jpod” by Douglas Coupland. It’s the second time I’ve read his books; the first being ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which I find endearing and amusingly empowering. This one, however, induces a familiar yet quite a different kind of hilarity; it got me to palm my face every five pages or so; I had to hold the escaping chuckles through my teeth so that other passengers in the bus wouldn’t think I’m crazy; I need to put this book in the time-out corner like three times a day until I can get through the intense irony and blatant shenanigans without shedding any tears (of misery? of joy? Who knows) and actually relishing in making fun of the absurd, surreal lives in the neo-capitalist, technology cusp hellhole. At one glance, Ethan Jawlerski is just one of your typical, average white-collared employees you can see in and out of the office complex amongst many similar faces. He could stop you on the street to ask for the time and the second he left you would have already forgotten what he looks like. But with a little digging, we found out how wacko his life is. For most of the time, he’s stuck in his little cubicle alongside his team ‘Jpod’ whose sole purpose in coming to work is ‘to do amazingly little’ and yet still give the illusion of being the most productive employees-of-the-year. His co-workers —the Jpodders— crow well mountain juniper (all lower case) a.k.a John Doe, Bree Jyang, Casper ‘Cancer Cowboy’ Jesperson, Evil Mark, and the enchanting newcomer Kaitlyn Joyce, are more than willing to jump in the honorary procrastination and enthusiastically participating in a series of friendly competitions involving first hundred thousands of pi, love letter for Ronald McDonald, or simply comprising list of new Lucky Charm shapes. Anything to delay the production of the new skateboard video game they’re currently developing for a gaming company under the passive-aggressive management of Steve Lefkowitz, the new boss of jPod. And as if he lacks any source of trouble, here goes his lovely parents Carol and Jim Jarlewski ready to drag him around to fix up their mess of questionable financial ventures and underhanded promiscuity. Even the supposedly put-together older brother, Greg, did little to nothing to alleviate his burden of bearing immature parents. To make matters worse, he prided himself as a global visionary and dabbled in a morally gray business plan with China conglomerates, which resulted in introducing the wild card Kam Fong and umm, his ‘travel associates’ to the picture. As the cherry on top, Douglas Coupland himself popped up playing the devil —seriously, if the God appears in the next chapter as an old Southern man having a drink in a dim bowling bar with Big <s>Jarlewski</s> Lebowski, I would’ve figured as much. The plethora of characters with each their own endearing quirks are the basis for most of the side-splitting, tear-inducing, laugh-until-you-can't-breathe happiness of a romping good time in the novel. The character flaws and unique personality traits dominantly act as the red thread over the course of the story, making it less like an actual plot than a mere string of wildly nonsensical situations that the characters help themselves in — much like ‘Seinfield’, where nothing happens but quite a lot of mess ensues. Everyone seems to live in a gray area as a consensus and deviate themselves from the norm, even the presumably law-abiding citizens such as Ethan’s middle-aged mother, who owns a marijuana farm, accidentally ended someone’s life and proceeded to bury the body in a mogul’s backyard. There’s a part of the novel that strikes hard on me, particularly Kaitlyn’s line “....you feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblages of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete—whether it’s labour market obsolescence of cultural unhipness and it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle ….” It goes without saying that the competition for self-authenticity has not stopped since puberty where our ego develops and believes that we are exceptional. When the Jpodders were challenged to post a love letter for Ronald, they proved that in their conceivable uniqueness lies the fact that they were bound by something similar. It doesn’t matter how widely different their backstories are, each character has the shared experience of Big Mac and Fries. It echoes the premise that no matter how much we believe that we are the arbiter of our own identity, we are still a part of the general socio economic scheme, making it impossible for us to be the only one of its kind. How I wish my 14-year-old self knew that. As a millennial who has entered the workforce for 10+ years, the theme of widespread despondency around the Jpodders has never been more appealing to me than now. Years and years of toxic productivity propaganda was revealed to be nothing more than a way for the rich to drive the poor to work harder for them in exchange for pittance. A constellation of qualities: severe pain, consistent degradation and insufferable humiliation; was all it took to notice the unjustified labor compensation the corporation has given its worker, and they slowly took a stance. The Jpodders procrastinate not solely on the ground of laziness but rather as an act of reclaiming their wasted time on hopeless projects. When the plan of reconfiguration of the game loomed as a threat on the horizon, they quietly lays the groundwork of a hidden gorefest gamechanger within the code as a way to protest the mismanagement of the heartless corporate, who views their toil and exertion as nothing more but money-making scheme, forgetting the fact that the one who works behind the cubicles are human, not a piece of statistic. This nuanced issue still resonates to a decade later, even more so than before as newer, more socially-conscious Gen Z starts to enter the workforce and trendset the “quiet quitting”, “lay down” and “lay to rot” movement. The only flaw I find is the Douglas Coupland character itself, whose self-insertion probably proved that either he thinks it’s more fun if you’re joining the game that you created and/or he concluded that it’s easier to find closure if the all-encompassing, cryptic character you based on yourself can serve as a plot device. Either way, I certainly can do without him. To say the least, I absolutely enjoyed the book and this has given me great joy to read. I’m trying not to sound sycophantic but honestly, I would read everything he ever writes.

John Manoogian III

It’s no MICROSERFS. It’s a post-9/11 MICROSERFS, a shade darker and with more humiliation, filler, China anxiety, and the occasional Al Quaeda beheading reference. But there are sweet moments and the ending is cute.

Cindy Lieberman

3.5. A crazy ride that skewers on-the-spectrum IT workers, Hollywood (in Vancouver) extras, and anyone (everyone) pursuing an alternative lifestyle. I listened to the audiobook so took little enjoyment from the long lists of acronyms or random (yet alphabetical) words. I didn’t care for some of the dismissive/misanthropic tone in some places, ironic or not. To wit: “Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people. TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.” 

The author makes a number of appearances in the book as himself, as a demi-god of sorts, at one point admitting that he has a 2-book deal and needs fodder for his second. And that’s a bit like how this feels. It isn’t great, although there are some great parts to it, but it does the job And there’s quite a bit of “getting away with it”-ness in the novel. I suspect the author may justifiably feel that he “got away with” fulfilling his book contract with this one.

Maria

the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity (c)

про jPod дугласа коупленда пишут, в основном, что это "социологический роман", "рабы майкрософта" поколения google и youtube", "ситком на 500 страниц" и "не книга, но произведение современного искусства", и все это, по большому счету, правда, хоть и не главное. главное про jPod - это практически непрекращающийся восторг, глумливое хихиканье в метро и некоторое ощущение стыда за то, что испытываешь такое удовольствие на публике

из всех книг коупленда история в jPod - самая абсурдная, потому что соберите вместе китайскую мафию, бальные танцы, брутальных лесбиянок, фаст-фуд, менеджера-героинщика и программистов-аутистов, и сами подумайте, что из этого выйдет. вместе с тем, с социологической точки зрения тот же "портрет техногика" - до болезненного узнавания реалистичен, а те кто не верит в людей, которые развлечения ради ищут среди 58 894 цифр затесавшуюся букву О, зайдите как-нибудь к нам в обеденный перерыв - услышите фразу вроде "математики зажигают - напились не то что в ноль, а в комплексные числа"

и да, если вы не знаете, кто такие гики, у вас есть отличная возможность узнать, потому что jPod - энциклопедия гиковской жизни. один, обидевшись, проклял другого, и теперь тот другой не понимает мультики (he just doesn't get them!), второй истерит, потому что к нему подкрались с горном и подудели прямо в уши, и теперь он считает, что громкий звук отморозил те нейроны, которые позволяли ему парсить код на С++; они пишут письма рональду макдональду, продают себя на eBay, из принципа нон-конформизма меняются одеждой с беженцами из китая и вписывают в детский фэнтэзи-квест скрытый уровень, в котором обиженный на мир клоун отрывает всем головы 

jPod примечателен еще и тем, что по нему сняли сериал, где коупленд выступал как продюсер и соавтор сценария, и он получился еще более абсурдным, чем книга, а кроме того, добавил персонажам лица и тела, развернул по-хорошему любовную линию и подарил самому коупленду возможность сняться в роли трупа в лифте. тем более глупым видится закрытие сериала после первого сезона на вечном клиффхэнгере - пидорасам из fox в аду придется потесниться и пустить на постой мудаков с канадского cbc, которые даже dvd не смогли выпустить нормальный (на том, что выпустили, битая восьмая серия)

Patrik Järnefelt

a novel

jPod

Shawn

Andrea Mack

Ethan and his five co-workers are marooned in Jpod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive game-design company. There they wage battle against the demands of boneheaded marketing staff who torture them with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is being invaded by marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, global piracy and the rise of China. Everybody in both worlds seems to inhabit a moral grey zone, and nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly strait-laced parents or Coupland himself ...

JPod

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