Anyone who knows me well will know that I’ve never really seen eye-to-eye with the writing of Douglas Coupland. In fact, I once wrote the following review thing for The Penny (sigh).

Have a read and see if you can work out how delighted I was to read the back cover copy of the preview of my book and see the line…

“If Paul Carr didn’t exist, Douglas Coupland would have to invent him.”

Seriously.

* * * *

Web Me Point Oh

Paul Carr on JPod, Douglas Coupland’s tale of love, death and corporate stupidity for the Google generation.

Of all the contemporary hipster authors, there is none more sharp, more ironic, more iconic, dammit, than Douglas Coupland. Not my opinion of course, but that of Douglas Coupland. How else can one possibly explain the following lines that open JPod, Coupland’s web 2.0 respin of his 1996 novel, Microserfs. You’ll probably want to sit down for this.

“Oh god. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel”.
“That asshole”

Oof. Very ironic. And yet despite having the most painful opening and arguably the worst title of any 21st century novel, JPod soon gets into a nice, comfortable stride. It’s classic Coupland fare all the way as we follow a group of mildly-autistic snack-food munching computer game designers, tasked with designing a new skateboarding game while gamely tossing around target references like so much Cheeto confetti - Atari!, Google! Ronald McDonald! And, of course, this being Coupland, around them all manner dark events are happening - a dead biker!, Chinese people-smuggling!, heroin as an executive toy! - like it ain’t no thing. And then there are the nice stylistic touches- random snippets of Viagra spam to break up the action, Google keywords dotted around the place - and some nice set-piece gags, including a piece of pitch- perfect Ronald McDonald slash-fic. Nice, nice, nice. Blah blah blah.

But while all this is going on, Coupland is lulling us - poor unsuspecting saps that we are - into a false sense of security ahead of his big moment. The moment that history will forever recall as ‘the terrible events of page 256′. The moment where, 36,000 feet above the coast of China, Coupland steps into his own book as a central character. That’s right, on page 256 we soon realise that this is a Douglas Coupland novel, starring none other than Douglas Coupland.

Now, to his credit, Doug makes a pretty decent fist of justifying his presence as the driving force of his own novel. I won’t spoil it for you save to say that it involves Coupland the entrepreneur in need of talented game designers. And it could have been a neat concept, if executed by a supremely skilled writer and with plausible fictional deniability. Think Rauol Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Coupland may be many things, but he’s no Hunter S. Thompson. His ego isn’t quite big enough, his story telling ability not quite sharp enough and his use of reference-filled cud-chewing between characters in lieu of actual story, not un-ubiquitous enough. On the upside, at least JPod is an easy read. 448 pages feels weighty until you realise how much of that is filler. No fewer than 15 pages are used up simply listing the first hundred thousand digits of pi. I shit you not. Coupland, it’s clear, is a man who gets paid by the word. As am I, as am I also.

But hold on just a second. Let’s take a step back from JPod, stare through the text and focus on an imaginary point behind the back cover. Aha. Suddenly, as if by magic, we see a bigger, previously invisible picture forming. The true point of JPod and the reason - despite Coupland’s best efforts - why it works so brilliantly.

Since Coupland wrote Microserfs in the mid 90s, the Interent has taken over the world, bringing with it a level of direct personal expression that traditional media could never have allowed. Today, thanks to sites like Myspace and Blogger, anyone can be a celebrity; anyone can have fans; and anyone can write acres of turgid prose to communicate with those fans, even if those fans happen to be limited to the writer’s parents and their best friend.

And that’s not all. Once we’ve established ourselves as a cyber micro-celebrity, we can pay sites like Lulu.com to have our ego-words turned into an actual printed book. A book of me. A book of you. Suddenly everyone’s a star author, a legend in their own bathroom.

And so it is that, by producing his very own ‘book of me’, a self-indulgent projection of the iconoclast he so clearly yearns to be, Coupland has actually succeeded in creating the ultimate living, breathing pastiche of the digital world as it stands today. The peferct parody.

It’s just a shame he’s not smart enough to realise what he’s done.

That asshole.

Related Reading

Mark McGowan: the impossibility of art in the mind of a fucking moron
"Mark McGowan - if because you haven't heard of him - is a performance artist. But, unlike those who chose 'performance' because it's the medium that best suits what they want to say, McGowan is a performance artist because he...\\

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Maddy-ness of Crowds
"In the nicest possible way, the next person to send me that 'Missing Maddy' email forward thing is going to get unsubscribed as a friend. Is there seriously *anyone* in Britain who receives that email and thinks to themselves 'shit,...\\

You can take the boy out of the press release…
" From: "Cohen, Benjamin"  Date: 9 December 2008 11:19:07 GMT To: "Cohen, Benjamin"  Subject: Channel4 News Exclusive: Wikipedia founder considers legal action after site is blocked in Britain CREDIT CHANNEL 4 NEWS WITH ALL MATERIAL USED   CHANNEL 4 NEWS EXCLUSIVE: WIKIPEDIA FOUNDER CONSIDERED LEGAL ACTION AGAINST...\\