A cover by any other design

Sometimes you are rewarded when mammalian instincts are ignored and you forge ahead and you just do it (please note: 100% not affiliated with the hugely successful 1990’s campaign slogan of an athletic shoe monolith based in Beaverton, Oregon). Because really, everyone makes a big do-up about our instincts, but on a case by case basis, our instincts are usually shite. What does your instincts tell you? Listen to your instincts. My instincts told me to inhale a bag of roasted pistachios last night and now I have first degree diarrhea. Let’s just say that I am not in a happy place.

Regardless, this is about Douglas Coupland’s Jpod, and not my battles with IBS. So, I ignored my initial repulsion to this book and bought it. Paid cash money for it, not borrowed, not loitered in some big box chain store and stealth-read it over the course of a few days. I thoroughly enjoyed two other Coupland offerings, Generation X and All Families are Psychotic, but I hesitated when I saw this in various window displays. It was purely on a superficial level, I very much un-liked the cover. As a former advertising and new media designer and current unpaid freelance critic of culture, it just smelled a tad ‘played out’. For the last few years, I have an immediate ‘puke-in-my-mouth’ reaction whenever I see the use of letters in front of words to display youthiness and or extreminosity — ‘i’ this or ‘e’ that. It blatantly screams, I was thought up by a group of 40 year olds in some corporate marketing brainstorming circle jerk. This is by no means a slur against 40 year old marketing professionals and or circle jerks, it is simply my personal disgust of their union and subsequent byproducts.

Published in 2006, this is the latest bastard offspring from German-born, Canadian-raised, corn-fed, free-ranged author Douglas Coupland. Coupland is also an accomplished sculptor, artist, designer, ironist, media critic, playwright, screenwriter and all around fun guy. Buddy wears a lot of hats, and they all seem to be slanted. Jpod seems to be the byproduct of Coupland’s diverse range of knowledge and talents. It reads more like a typographic art concept, rather than a conventional work of fiction. Which fits the bill nicely for the slice of life he is documenting.

Set in modern Vancouver, BC, we quickly learned that ‘Jpod’ is the nickname for a group of employees within a major video game publisher grouped together due to a HR anomaly. This explanation seemed to do wonders for my gag reflex, and I was able to hold down my lunch for the remainder of the book. From this point we are witness to the random and peculiar details of one Jpodder in particular: Jarlewski, Ethan. Through the banal, trivial, sadisitc sometimes criminal activities of his peers, we see his personal and professional lives slowly merge into one big ironic tofurkey. There are subplots galore, we have grows-ops, parental infidelity, human trafficking, recreational narcotics, web culture, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, rural Chinese industrial complexes and more — all held together poetically by the golden rainbow that is capitalism. Coupland captures the ethos of Ethan’s post tech-bubble existence to perfection. The dream of internet riches has dried up. The coolness of working in a seemingly creative industry has been replaced with bureaucracy, monotony, internal strife, low morale and a posture that would be envied by French bell-tower dwellers.

Within the text, there are numerous literary versions of adware, pastebombs and spam. It compliments the overall ambiance. Gimmicky? Sure, but also fits well with the subject matter and the target audience. We are living in the ‘Cut and Paste’ era. There are numerous cultural references and inside jokes for those who are indoctrinated in the language of google and social networks (God, I hate that term) and their ilk…But for the rest you real world peoples, the characters could seem empty, materialistic, vacuous and amoral. Which they are. The fact that I could relate with their gross behaviour was more revolting that the acts themselves. Giggling to myself as the characters went through one preposterous life event after another.

Who are these people? These sick, twisted people. How can they live like this? And there’s the rub. You don’t have to try very hard to relate to any of the multitude of apparent clinical psychosis displayed. They are you and me kiddo, in all our glory. Searching for answers while subverting experiences via material and capital gain, which is essentially an exercise in futility. Hi there, I’m your soul. We should talk sometimes…

All this to say, that it was fantastically delicious read. A real page turner, but on the same token I can see someone else regarding it as trivial, sociopathic and superfluous. Satire, irony, wit and self-deprecation are Coupland’s finishing moves in the battle octagon that is Jpod. Extra style points for writing himself in as a capitalistic self-serving porker. It defines a particular existence in a particular point of time with distinction. But, let’s not lose our grip, and deem it the quintessential weather vane for our current history. It rings true for those who are living in this particular whacked out world. But it is only one slice out of the multi-grain loaf that is modern civilization.

Poignant social commentary about a generation on the brink of complete self-dillusion? Meh. An analogy on the human disenchantment with the promises of Democracy and Capitalism? Prolly. His best work? Dunno. A great read? Mos def.