Jonesin' for Jpod

Almost all of us at The Daily Wenzel have enjoyed the many books of Douglas Coupland, though being the reflective academic types, there has always come a point where we choose to disagree with his sense of social direction or interpretation. Rather than wallow in the sense of shiftless and closure to success central to Generation X, we wanted to celebrate it. Shampoo Planet was good, but came too soon after our own European sojourns and our views on its social function and meaning coloured our enjoyment of it. Similarly, a difference of philosophical and metaphysical opinion clouded Life After God.

But not Jpod.

With Jpod, our views and Coupland's finally mesh, as he presents a vision of society that we've always had. Unlike the characters in Microserfs who toiled ceaselessly for the MotherCorp because they believed in the saving power of technology, the characters in Jpod are jaded beyond belief, and use obscure elements of pop culture to try and assuage themselves. More interestingly is there relationship to their work, where they are seemingly trapped in the so-called Jpod, but are free to come and go as they please, showing up for work at all hours of the day, sometimes even going to work specifically to sleep. Technology is no longer a saviour, Coupland scatters late 1990s spam email throughout the book, as if to remind us how naive things once were, but rather a poor substitute. The characters inhabitants of Jpod are so divorced from human contact that one of them builds hug machine for everyone on the floor to use.

Douglas Coupland has once again proven himself to be a skilled novelist, capable of capturing the zeitgeist. We can only be pleased that his interpretation meshes with ours.