The best way to get me to investigate or purchase something is to have small references to it come to me at the same time from two distinct directions. It’s how I first heard of some of my favorite things. Travis, Neal Stephenson, and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X some 14 years ago.
I’ll save you the <rant> about the media’s mischaracterization of the term Generation X. I guess at this point the phrase has been co-opted so thoroughly that it no longer belongs to Coupland. But in the early 90’s, Coupland wrote a fantastic first novel about three adults wasting away their days in the California desert, avoiding responsibility with their “McJobs” and passing the time by weaving modern fairy tales. Great book. You should read it. It would take you an afternoon. It’s the source of many of my favorite phrases, like Option Paralysis and Semi-disposable Swedish Furniture.
Coupland’s follow-up, Shampoo Planet was less beautiful, but richer in character. After SP, followed Microserfs which end’s Ethan’s Recommended Book Club (starring Douglas Coupland). I didn’t care for the next few novels I read. And I haven’t read his last two at all. But I may have to read his next. Hell, it’s like he wrote it for me.
Andrew Donoghue of ZDNET UK writes:
Having characterized the 1990s zeitgeist of life at Microsoft in the novel “Microserfs,” Canadian author and technophile Douglas Coupland has turned his attention on “Generation Xbox.”
“JPod,” due to be released in the U.S. on May 15 and in the U.K. on June 5, “updates ‘Microserfs’ for the age of Google,” according to the book’s Web site.
“Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames end in ‘J’ are bureaucratically marooned in JPod. JPod is a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company,” the site explains.
Where “Microserfs” dealt with the struggles of a group of Microsoft employees trying to break free from the staid and clinical existence in the Redmond, Wash., campus and create their own start-up, “JPod” looks at the lives of tech workers today, making their way uncertainly through the global pillaging of intellectual property, the clueless thrashings of boneheaded marketing staff, the rise of China, and the ashes of the 1990s high-tech, high-rolling dream.
Sold American. Or Sold Canadian, I guess.
Post a Comment