JPod

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

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
.