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Michael Stipe credits Douglas Coupland for those frightening faux-hawks that the R.E.M. singer sported back in the days of Losing My Religion.
Coupland, Stipe often says, told him if you really want to be remembered, you need to invent a haircut.
Of course, you also could ensure immortality by naming an entire generation, as Coupland did with his 1991 debut, Generation X. It's a designation the slacker set never has shaken, and neither has Coupland. Defining a cultural moment sometimes means being pinned to it forever. Coupland made that even easier by drenching his subsequent novels in empty irony, shapeless plots and more wink-wink witticisms than an episode of VH1's I Love the '90s.
But Coupland is in the midst of a mid-career renaissance as vital and unexpected as his friends in R.E.M. As he has tried on new voices, such as lost teens in his underappreciated 2003 school-shooting novel Hey Nostradamus! and the lonely middle-aged woman at the center of 2004's Eleanor Rigby, his novels gained a surprising, much-needed heart.
His latest, JPod, is set in the cubicles of Generation Google, where Ethan Jarlewski and five friends toil for a Vancouver video-game maker. Their boss has just assigned them a project that will wreck the company's new fantasy game by adding a kid-friendly turtle that sounds suspiciously like Survivor's Jeff Probst. But the turtle will create all sorts of new merchandising tie-ins.
Meanwhile, Ethan's dad, a competitive ballroom dancer trying to break into B-movies, is having an affair with a high school classmate. Ethan's mom is growing marijuana and may have just killed someone.
And the men who run a Chinese immigrant-smuggling ring with Ethan's brother have just set up a karaoke bar in Ethan's living room. Imagine a cocktail of The Office, Weeds and Wired magazine, shaken not stirred.
The denizens of JPod battle back by adding a secret (and very twisted) Ronald McDonald character to the game. They spend their days imagining how they would sell themselves on eBay, drafting memos that explain why documents are 34% more boring when written in the Courier typewriting font and playing Scrabble with no E's, S's or T's.
In his similar but less-skilled novel Microserfs, all this product placement was a shortcut: Coupland's characters simply were what they consumed.
In JPod, it's an affirmation of life, a road map to friendship at a time when office life is dehumanizing, families are surreal, and people communicate with e-mailed emoticons.
Yes, subtlety still eludes Coupland, and his relentless riffing can be exhausting. No, there isn't any reason for pages listing 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 or when he runs pi to 100,000 digits and challenges readers to find the incorrect digit.
When Coupland introduces himself as a character, it seems to be because he has no idea how to wrap up this 448-page beast.
At this point, however, criticizing Coupland for too many pop-culture and trademarked-name references is as tired as dismissing the Rolling Stones simply for being old.
Perhaps it's time to admire his virtuoso tone and how he has refined it over 11 novels. The master ironist just might redefine E.M. Forster's famous dictate "Only connect" for the Google age. No need to invent a haircut if he keeps pulling that off.
JPod
By Douglas Coupland
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., $24.95
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