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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. Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also works in visual arts and theater. His novels include Generation X, Microserfs, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, and Eleanor Rigby. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. 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. "To Coupland's credit, the technologically sophisticated but socially alienated universe that he anticipated in 1995 is an even more tangible and complicated entity in 2000—a time when people really do speak in regurgitated sound bites from The Simpsons, and are labeled autistic simply because they are shy, and are granted preposterous job descriptions like being part of a 'world-building team' when they possess little control over the world in which they live—and that gives him license to revisit this territory in JPod."—The New York Times "The perfect vehicle for [Coupland's] funny and poignant evocations of near-term nostalgia . . . there is brilliance at work in JPod."—Los Angeles Times "Zeitgeist surfer Douglas Coupland downloads his brain into Jpod."—Vanity Fair "Jpod is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away."—New York Times Book Review "A willful, joyful satire that revels in the same cultural conventions that it sends up."—Rocky Mountain News "Perhaps it's time to admire [Coupland's] virtuoso tone and how he has refined it over 11 novels. The master ironist just might redefine E.M. Forster's famous dictate 'Only connect' for the Google age."—USA Today "Coupland is mining territory that has been largely ignored by the literary set . . . the novel shows Coupland did his homework."—The Washington Post "No one has Coupland's ability to spot cultural outliers, the little gems of nonsense that can both jar you and impart joy. Coupland is his generation's most interesting curator."—Slate "No, JPod is not the next version of iPod; it refers to a group of geeks with last names starting with J cubicled together in a distant quadrant of a giant Vancouver video-game corporation. Coupland revisits the digital kingdom he so shrewdly depicted in Microserfs (1995) in a zeitgeist-trawling satire about twenty-first-century cyber obsession. JPoder Ethan Jarlewski narrates in deadpan geekspeak, reporting on life in gamer land, where he and his fellow designers—each precocious, cynical, oddball charming, and possibly a touch autistic—invent hilariously clever trivial pursuits to avoid work. But Ethan is often distracted from fun with porn sites, math problems, and an evil cyber version of Ronald McDonald by the crazy demands of his off-the-charts family. There's a South Park edginess and surrealism to the frequently violent escapades of Ethan's actor-wannabe father, gun-toting and pot-growing mother, and real-estate salesman brother, who gets them all entangled with the gangster Kam Fong. As both actual and cyber mayhem crest, Coupland, himself a character in this rampaging comedy, reminds us that no matter how seductive the virtual realm is, it is real life that requires our keenest attention."—Donna Seaman, Booklist "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."—Publishers Weekly ...
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On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse. ...
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“Wildly differing perspectives merge beautifully into one cohesive look at loneliness and despair. Yes, Coupland is dark and cutting about our fluorescent-lit times, but there's also a real underlayer of gratitude here, for the hand that can reach down and unite with you in the darkness. A–.”—Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, “aisles associates” at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger’s opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger’s unsettled—and unsettling—life. Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them…and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you. Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also works in visual arts and theater. His novels include Eleanor Rigby, Generation X, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, and JPod. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. In Douglas Coupland's witty novel we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger's co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6. One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she's never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, he is getting her right.
These two retail workers then strike up an epistolary relationship that unfolds alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief reveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life.
"Mr. Coupland remains a funny novelist, but he has become a poignant one as well." —The Wall Street Journal"[ The Gum Thief] abounds in catchy turns of phrase and personal observations from the characters' points of view on topics ranging from asteroid belts to the colors of the Italian flag. Many of the funniest passages include ruminations about office supplies, those who buy them and the outlets where they are sold . . . Without giving anything away, the ending is just as compelling and subtle as the rest of Coupland's brilliant novel."— Richard Melo, The Portland Oregonian"Right from the get-go we’re deep in Coupland country with The Gum Thief: the über-now pop culture references, the casual, deliciously snide vernacular, the loopy, neurotic characters you can’t help but love, and of course, the late-night conversational tone of Coupland himself, whose writing reads like a phone call from an old friend. No one else quite captures the dystopian malaise of our post-postmodernist consumer-junkie culture quite like he does. Call it CoMo: Coupland Modernism. In this, his 11th novel, Coupland introduces us to Roger Thorpe, a divorced, middle-aged 'sales associate' at Staples, plodding through his forties while avoiding the latest office furniture shipment and drinking himself into oblivion. Enter Bethany, goth girl and Staples co-worker, who strikes up an unusual and touching correspondence with Roger, their lives unfolding alongside Roger’s abysmal novella-in-progress, Glove Pond. The novel-within-the-novel is a delightful device – reading bad writing has never been more fun. Or funny. Through the letters Roger and Bethany share, Coupland presents the deadening banality of the contemporary moment. How we drive from parking lot to parking lot, trapped in one big-box store after another, waiting in line for The End of the World. Like Coupland’s other novels, there’s a feeling of pre-apocalyptic anxiety in the lives of Roger and Bethany. And yet, as in Generation X, it is through their shared friendship, and their stories, that Roger and Bethany transcend the meaninglessness of their lives."—Christine Walde, Quill & Quire
"The Gum Thief is classic Douglas Coupland. His characters are young and disaffected—they have opted out of modern life because, well, if modern life is cloning, carbon footprints and ‘Sno-Kone cellulite’, what kind of moron would opt in? ‘Just because you've been born and made it through high school doesn't mean society can't still abort you,’ says Bethany, the teen-goth, contemplating the rejects in her workplace. But don't think that this is a novel about how modern life is rubbish, and we're all going to cop out and play MySpace instead. It is much more hopeful, more touching and more Couplandesque than that. When Bethany writes those words, it is actually Roger—her middle-aged dropout colleague—writing in her voice. This is a novel so postmodern that it has disappeared up its own irony and come out on the other side. In anyone else's hands, it could read like an environmental treatise by Al Gore translated by a teenage dirtbag after 17 vodka Red Bulls. But Coupland's skill is in his love of the ridiculous, like a schoolboy whose words make him giggle . . . The last chapter, a critique of Roger's book by a patronising creative-writing teacher, is a nice touch. Its tone, he says, is too ‘smug’. Coupland's novel is anything but."—Katy Guest, The Independent (UK)
"Coupland is dark and cutting about our fluorescent-lit times, but there's also a real underlayer of gratitude here, for the hand that can reach down and unite with you in the darkness."—Entertainment Weekly
"Relentlessly contemporary Coupland helped explode the Gen-X mind-set, and now follows his specimens as they stumble into their inevitable midlife crisis. Roger, a forty-something alcoholic washup and aisle-jockey at Staples ponders the unlikelihood of escaping one's pitiable little life. Another soul trapped in the sterile confines is Bethany, a goth girl with her own private disaster of a life. The two form an unlikely friendship in this cleverly crafted, bitterly funny epistolary novel, while at the same time Roger works on his own novel, a Cheever-like exercise wherein bitter couples lob witty insults at each other while drowning in Scotch and failure . . . Chronicling life's crises that don't only happen in the middle, Coupland . . . is almost always very clever—rather than heartfelt as his creations slowly tick off the things that they will never become."—Ian Chipman, Booklist
"Bethany, transitioning from goth teen to adult, and Roger, flailing in his forties, have washed up at Staples, a modern circle of hell where employees mindlessly rearrange office paraphernalia. In their world, security footage of th ...
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They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day "coding" and eating "flat" foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to "flame" one of them. But now there's a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world. ...
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Generation X is a field guide to and for the vast generation born in the late 1950s and the 1960s--a generation that has been erroneously labelled "postponed" and "indifferent." This is facto-fiction about a wildly accelerating subculture waiting in the corridor....
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