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Douglas Coupland is the patron saint of overeducated underachievers. He created the slacker's gospel for the 1990s with his debut novel, Generation X, chronicling the lives of three friends who had opted out of the rat race to spend their time lounging round a swimming pool in California. And he's back to his zeitgeisty, epoch-defining best with his latest novel, JPod (Bloomsbury, £12.99), which promises to become the slacker's gospel for the dotcom generation.
It's a curious book, with a curious array of typographical gimmickry, and it's hard to decide whether it's terribly profound or terribly nihilistic, or maybe some kind of confection of the two amounting to something profoundly nihilistic. Whatever. It isn't pretentious; it is clever; it is well written; and it's always diverting.
Coupland follows the lives of six cynical computer-programmers stuck
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Douglas Coupland has written another great book dedicated to those who do very little, says tim auld
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in an office in the nether regions of a games software company in Vancouver; and he is at his best and funniest when dramatising the time-wasting games and chatter they use to drag themselves through their working days.
However, light as his touch may be, Coupland is clearly out to give us more than a spin-off of Friends set in geeksville. There's an eerie lack of emotion in the characters' interactions, and some bad things happen without a squeak of moral censure. The material trappings of Western society are at once reviled and hungrily pursued. Everyone seems somehow alienated, terminally, from the lives they truly want to lead.
So there is a serious intent behind the comic chaos of JPod, but don't expect Coupland, an ironist to the last, to spell it out. 
FIRST
POSTED MAY 30, 2006
The Female of the Species
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