Nailing the zeitgeist

When Microserfs was published in 1995, it sealed Douglas Coupland’s reputation as a nonpareil, the foremost recorder of American popular culture and the digital revolution. Tracing the lives of a group of computer coders who abandon Bill Gates’ campus-like corporation to start up their own company, the novel became famous as the definitive account of the explosive success of Microsoft, and as a prediction of the eventual disillusionment of its most talented employees. By then, Coupland was already known as the curator of the 1990s zeitgeist after his debut novel, Generation X (1991), was hailed as the defining mouthpiece for his post-Baby Boomer contemporaries.

But this status came at a price. Coupland is regularly panned for ignoring novelistic elements like character and plot in favour of one-liners, riffs and neologisms. This criticism is generally fair. But Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) — which combined Coupland’s concerns for the present, the future and the effect of mass popular culture with full characterisation, innovative plotting and a daring ending — seemed to signal a growing maturity, and an ambition to take himself more seriously as a novelist.

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Since then, his books have been increasingly better written and less concerned with capturing the spirit of the present — until now. JPod, a sequel to Microserfs, is about a group of disillusioned twenty-somethings sitting in cubicles, supposedly coding a computer game. In fact they spend their time making jokes and observations about the cheapness and pervasiveness of modern popular culture. Unfailingly self-aware, JPod features a character called Douglas Coupland and lines like, ‘Oh God, I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.’ It specifically acknowledges weaknesses in characterisation and plot, and is acutely aware of its status as an updated form of Coupland’s earlier, zeitgeist-obsessed novels.