Book Review: JPod

The latest offering from Douglas Coupland reminds me of a Harry Potter novel. Lots of pages, reads quickly, and chock full of magic spells and teen angst.
Oh, wait, the characters in this book are not teens. Yet they all seem emotionally frozen at a certain point just shy of adulthood. Which is odd, since topically this is a kind of sequel to Microserfs, which dealt with a younger group of coders entrenched in the tech industry. But the characters from that earlier work seemed more emotionally stable, better able to handle the plot twists and turns that the "everything including the kitchen sink" author threw at them.
Trying to describe the plot of JPod is like attempting to guess the next song that your ipod will play in shuffle mode. Almost everyone I know who has an ipod claims that it takes on some sort of personality, favoring certain artists or genres, as if it had moods of its own. JPod reads that way, shifting from moments of fantastical escapism to bleak social commentary and then off to some twenty page mind game.
The characters? I have no doubt that people in this industry possess some measure of personality quirk that makes them both good at what they do and prone to interesting adventures or random flights of thought. Coupland tries to flesh out his characters through various personality defining quizzes and games that are the stuff of the viral e-mails that circulate amongst people, theoretically filling in the blanks on their background with various factoids and traits. What starts out as an amusing shortcut in character development devolves into a pattern of lazy writing, with a structural familiarity that induces the reader to pass over it like so much spam. When one takes into account the actual use of spam as a filler device peppered throughout the book, Coupland's technique here causes the narrative to collapse in on itself, merging what he wants the reader to know about the characters with the random noise.
And what of the Coupland doppelganger, the deus ex machina author himself? He is the least believable, most reviled character in the book, yet essential to the resolution of the "plot". Writing yourself as an ass doesn't exclude you from scrutiny, nor does it work as a device of creating and resolving tension in this story-line.
Overall, I was simultaneously amused by this hefty lightweight novel and disappointed that Coupland felt the need to structure it like some weak maze game. Pushing your characters through various levels, finding power-ups, hidden doors, and magic faeries to move the plot along is cute and all, but I expect better from Coupland. Turn on a light, sir, lest you be eaten by a grue.
Rating: three of a kind.