JPod

An early contender for worst novel of the 21st century, Douglas (Generation X) Coupland's dated, incorrigible JPod fails both as a work of literature and as a piece of performance art. I'm not sure which Coupland intended it to be, but let's hope it's the latter. At least that way, having failed spectacularly in book form, he can attempt to embellish it with some naked interpretive dance or Tuvan throat singing during his Seattle appearance.

Ostensibly, JPod revolves around a man named Ethan Jarlewski and six video-game company employees who inhabit a block of cubicles. Moreover, Ethan's parents run a home-grow pot emporium out of their Vancouver, B.C., home, and his brother is a big-shot financier who dabbles in immigrant smuggling. Herein, Coupland strives to utilize every typeface available to him, as well as interrupt his cataract-inducing plot by interspersing spam e-mail and consecutive pages filled with numerals and Japanese symbols. A particularly poignant non sequitur—seemingly spliced in to exhibit society's collectively short attention span and addiction to trash pop culture—reads as follows: "I scorch your loins with coffee that sears like a molten steel patty flipper." And the closest Coupland gets to actual coherency comes on p. 397 (which is left unnumbered, for no discernible reason): "I'm so fucking sick of Google." Great, but you don't need 450 pages to get that point across. Hell, you don't even need one.

Fellow stream-of-consciousness postmodernists including Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis are talented enough to sustain a book chockablock with tripe asides, but Coupland isn't. He's just not a very good writer. In fact, he's a rather lazy, terrible writer, a one-trick gimmick artist badly in need of a software upgrade. If the book can be downloaded, don't risk ruining your iPod with it.