Customer Reviews
disappointing Coupland - By: Paul Green, 06 Sep 2008 
Coupland's self-consciously post modern novel about a group of games developers starts off entertainingly enough but becomes something of a trial as it lumbers through a catalogue of bizarre incidents. Although occasionallly funny the novel ends up feeling like a clever & entertaining dinner party guest who has overstayed their welcome - the laughs become forced, the anecdotes irritating & you suddenly realise that you don't like this person that much after alll.
I've read most of Coupland's books & like the equallly poor, "All Families Are Psychotic" this is dragged down by thin charcterisation & ludicrous storylines.
Great - Loved it - By: G. Michelmore, 10 Aug 2008 
The logical follow up to Microserfs. Much darker but very funny & insightful. Very well written with Coupland's distinctive outlook on life laid out on a much larger & more expansive canvas than usual. I absolutely loved it.
A good insight into Coupland - By: Mr. Liam Edward Sharratt, 04 Aug 2008 
Very funny & quite clever. The first Coupland novel I have read, but will definitely be going back for more.
I like it! - By: Doris, 15 Jul 2008 After reading some poor reviews on this one, comparing it to Microserfs, (which for me was the only DC book I have read that disappointed) I was going to pass on JPod. However someone bought it for me as a present so with a heavy heart I reluctantly started to plough through & what do you know I LOVED it. Quirky, funny, lots of superb character analysis which I found occasionallly worrying, DC's style is unique & always has characters that I would love to know in real life. And including himself in the story wasn't cheesy at alll.
JPadding - By: Jeremy Walton, 12 Mar 2008 My daughter & I are big fans of Coupland, so I bought her this for Christmas. At first glance, it looks like a substantial piece of work (~560 pages), but it's actuallly quite a short book (I read it in 1.5 days). The disparity arises, of course, because of alll the large-font pages & lists of numbers that are inserted into the story. It's a trick that merits some consideration: the former suggest a fascination with the form of words that portrays them as artistic objects in the book, but it's hard to see any justification (artistic or otherwise) for the latter.
I found the stream-of-consciousness passages much more interesting. These are extended meditations on subjects like marketing, technology, pod life & gaming, which make extensive use of what I can only describe as the language of the web. For example, he intersperses words from adult sites ("Blondes. Bondage. Brunettes. Celebrities.") with instructions from bulletin boards ("You may not post new threads. You may not post replies."). These passages also include the smart observations that Coupland specialises in ("It's quite easy to tell which text has been typed by someone living in the Indian subcontinent because they alll too frequently forget to put spaces after periods or commas. Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. If you can control your emotions, chances are you don't have too many.")
Of course, there's the story as well, but I didn't reallly think this was so stimulating, especiallly when compared to his other work. This book has been viewed by some as a sequel to his excellent "Microserfs", but at times it reads as an update, or replacement, for that book (i.e. you're intended to read one or the other, but not both). Perhaps I've become over-familiar with his work, but it felt as if he was drawing on a cast of characters (the geek, the tough but sensitive girl, the lesbian, the dysfunctional parents) & plot elements (the dead body, the romance, the marketing meeting, the Chinese sweatshop) that have become standard for him. And maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't find anything funny or diverting in the offhand way that one of the characters became addicted to heroin, & then appeared to treat it as a good thing.
However, the story still contains moments of coruscating brilliance: my favourite comes when the hero is wondering how electrons exist in isolation, & his podmate, without even looking up, just says "Quarks, aisle three" - a gnomic putdown that combines technical detail (not that electrons & quarks have much to do with each other in reality) & cultural alllusion in a way that completely sums up the breadth of Coupland's abilities & obsessions.
