I finished reading Douglas Coupland’s JPod last night. Here are a couple of my theories regarding this book:

  • Douglas Coupland is completely out of ideas and is gently strolling down the David Sedaris route of desperately presenting the most mundane situations and ideas as innovative. Not only that, but he knows it. There’s a twinge of panic about JPod that completely sets it apart from the laid-back coolness of Microserfs.
  • He got so sick of people asking for a sequel to Microserfs that he decided to punish them by churning out something that takes the same style and formula but takes it to the point where it actually mocks the reader. Case in point: 40 pages of the first 100,000 numbers of Pi with one wrong digit. What is this? The Da Vinci Code for autistics?
  • Maybe he really has, once again, completely captured the zeitgeist and the world is actually full of the same kind of boring, selfish fuckholes that appear as characters in JPod.

Personally, I think it’s probably a combination of all three.