Bloomsbury £12.99 pp449
JPod is the slightly annoying term Ethan Jarlewski and his four techy colleagues use for their work area in a Vancouver computer-game firm. It’s JPod because nearly everyone posted there has had a surname beginning with J. The exception is John Doe, but he changed his name from “crow juniper”. He was brought up in a lesbian commune, where capital initials were frowned on as patriarchal.
The team is working on a serious skateboarding game when management decides to introduce a cartoon turtle. They take revenge by devising secret codes that will convert the game into a gory shoot-’em-up featuring Ronald McDonald.
Douglas Coupland keeps the story light, skippy and cartoony. At the outset Ethan has to help his eccentric, dope-farming mom dispose of a dead body — she’s accidentally electrocuted someone in the homemade death trap she set up to protect her from dangerous druggie people — and the whole thing is treated as merely one of those tiresome errands your parents drag you into doing.
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The amusing lack of depth is not incidental. Ethan’s girlfriend Kaitlin reasons that all techies are mildly autistic, with the gift of recognising that “what we describe as ‘character’ and ‘personality’ are not so much spiritual or cosmic states of being, but rather, an overall effect created by clusters of overlapping brain dysfunctions”. When Ethan’s parents create a ridiculous scene about nothing, she observes drily, “I keep forgetting your family runs on Microsoft software.”
Coupland includes himself as a character, filching information from Ethan’s laptop to use in the novel. JPod clearly says something about an age when the geeks shall inherit the earth — but mainly, with the wealth of farcical invention underlying its bland, sheeny surface, it’s just very funny.
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