Coupland is still the only novelist I know who is prepared to engage seriously with technological, and especially digital, language. He is also hugely innovative when it comes to the visual effect of a novel. JPod features, among other oddities, pi written out to 100,000 decimal places, the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000, and an array of different type- settings. Coupland was originally, and still is, a sculptor and designer. His background and lack of overtly literary influence have given him the freedom to use non-literary artistic means of conveying ideas in novels. His artistic idol is Andy Warhol, which gives you some idea of his pop-culture concerns, and one of his strongest literary influences is Kurt Vonnegut — another technology-obsessed, satirical writer who employs innovative visual techniques. Coupland is in many ways Vonnegut’s successor, a fact he acknowledges in JPod with a respectful nod.
Coupland’s jokes and neat observations still bear his trademark Canadian wit and wry sarcasm, the product of being entirely absorbed by US-led culture while remaining on the margins, looking in and smirking. One character provides the stand-out joke: ‘Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We’re all assholes now.’
But for all this it’s still a shame that JPod doesn’t show more signs of Coupland’s maturing novelistic side. The characters in Girlfriend in a Coma are etched in my memory, but I can’t for the life of me remember who features in Generation X, or what happens. The mother of the family in All Families are Psychotic (2001) is an endearing and fully realised character, but the same can’t be said for the characters in Microserfs. While JPod is as virtuoso, as culturally sharp and as funny as we have come to expect from Coupland, its obsession with contemporary culture — with nailing the zeitgeist — leaves it lacking as a novel. In five years or so, I don’t expect to remember it very well.
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