Details
Synopsis
Cluttered with pop-culture minutiae and self-consciously geeky references, this frantically metafictional slacker chronicle serves as an early 21-century update of the zeitgeist that Douglas Coupland explored so famously in MICROSERFS. Thirty-year-old Ethan Jarlewski works in JPod (a slice of cubicle-farm consisting of co-workers whose last names all begin with "J"), coding for a Vancouver video-game company. Professionally, he's getting to know his office crush, Kaitlin, by playing pranks on her; as well as just generally goofing off to avoid the unpalatable task of inserting a friendly turtle character into what was supposed to be a cutting-edge skateboarding game. Personally, he's attempting (and failing) to fend off the endless demands of his family: his clingy, marijuana-growing mother (who accidentally electrocuted an extortionist biker); his needy, would-be actor and amateur ballroom-dancer father (currently conducting an affair with one of Ethan's former high-school classmates); and his wheeler-dealer older brother (who's stashing smuggled Chinese immigrants in Ethan's apartment). His life is clearly that of a Douglas Coupland character; it's no wonder, then, that Coupland himself enters the novel and takes an interest in Ethan and his co-workers., From the Publisher: JPod, Douglas Coupland's most acclaimed novel to date, is a lethal joyride into today's new breed of tech worker. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames begin with "J" are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod's universe is amoral, shameless, and dizzyingly fast-paced like our own.
| Size | | Length: | 448 pages | | Height: | 12.0 in | | Width: | 8.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 17.6 oz |
Industry Reviews
"JPOD is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away."
(05/21/2006)
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