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Title details for JPod by Douglas Coupland - Available

JPod

by Douglas Coupland
Marc Cashman
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
Very evil…very funny.
A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland’s new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google.
Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company.
The six jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a bone-headed 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 and shameless–and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they’re creating it. Everybody in Ethan’s life inhabits a moral gray zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. Full of word games, visual jokes, and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPOD is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 16, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415951095
      • File size: 304592 KB
      • Duration: 10:34:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In his quasi-sequel to MICROSERFS, Copland tells the story of six co-workers at a Vancouver video game development company. They long to leave their jobs after completing the latest game, but before they can do that, they find themselves at a dead end. The JPod crew play juvenile tricks on one another in a game of one-upmanship. Marc Cashman reads all the spam email in an uninflected voice that adds to the satire of the story. Special bright spots are Ethan's biker-killing mother and wannabe- actor father, who add humor that edges into slapstick. If you like computer geek novels, you'll smile over the absurdity of all this. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 20, 2006
      Coupland returns, knowingly, to mine the dot-com territory of Microserfs
      (1996)—this time for slapstick. Young Ethan Jarlewski works long hours as a video-game developer in Vancouver, surfing the Internet for gore sites and having random conversations with co-workers on JPod, the cubicle hive where he works, where everyone's last name begins with J. Before Ethan can please the bosses and the marketing department (they want a turtle, based on a reality TV host, inserted into the game Ethan's been working on for months) or win the heart of co-worker Kaitlin, Ethan must help his mom bury a biker she's electrocuted in the family basement which houses her marijuana farm; give his dad, an actor desperately longing for a speaking part, yet another pep talk; feed the 20 illegal Chinese immigrants his brother has temporarily stored in Ethan's apartment; and pass downtime by trying to find a wrong digit in the first 100,000 places (printed on pages 383–406) of pi. Coupland's cultural name-dropping is predictable (Ikea, the Drudge Report, etc.), as is the device of bringing in a fictional Douglas Coupland to save Ethan's day more than once. But like an ace computer coder loaded up on junk food at 4 a.m., Coupland derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters. Call it Microserfs 2.0
      .

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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