I think the last time I read a Douglas Coupland novel it was "Generation X," in the early 1990s.  I vaguely remember liking it, but it was so terribly overhyped that it was difficult to read the book on its own terms.  It both set off and fed upon the huge national discussion about Who We Are, or alternatively, Why These Kids Won't Get Off My Lawn.  I remember that it was difficult to read it as a book on its own merits.  This may have been the author's intent, what with all the little snippets of jargon in the margins.

At any rate, a friend recently mentioned Coupland's novel "JPod" in such glowing terms that I simply had to give it a try.  

(By the way, I was originally going to download it as an audiobook, but the comments on its audible.com page steered me away from this course.  I am glad that I did!  In several places the book lists, say, five pages of prime numbers, three columns per page.  Which is amusing and all when you're reading the paper book, because you skip right past those pages.  I can only imagine what the effect would be like in an audiobook.)

I enjoyed JPod so much that I took several days off from reading it, because I was reluctant to see the book end.  A lot of my reaction is because I too worked in the high tech world (as a Unix system administrator, not a developer, but almost the same thing from a literary perspective) during the bubble's boom and bust.  A lot of the wacky secondary storylines were wacky and fun, but it was the inter-office stuff that really killed me.  The scenes that take place in company meetings?  A masterwork!

The story revolves around "J Pod," a cluster of four cubicles in a vast game development company's cubicle farm.  Due to a quirk of the spreadsheet controlled seating system, people whose last name begins with the letter J are seated in J Pod, regardless of whether or not this makes sense for someone with their job description.  

JPod features tons of the shiny sparkly frothy and yet shockingly accurate descriptions that you might expect from a writer of Douglas Coupland's description, even if you have never actually read any of his books.  I can verify that this was the case for me, anyway - it was just as I expected it would be.  Like Chuck Pahlaniuk without all the gore or cross-dressing.  One excerpt that made me laugh out loud:

"[…] after a week of intensive Googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything.  God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless."

If I have a complaint about the book, it's about the aspect that Coupland obviously found most hilarious.  (And isn't that so often the case?  What's that about "murdering your darlings"?)  The author himself appears as a character in the book, and without spoiling too many details, throws the entire concept of the narrative (reliable or not) out the window.  But it's a small bit of the book (surprising, considering what a big impact it potentially has on how the book can be read) and easy enough to dismiss.