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Nov. 22nd, 2008 06:25 amI've been on a bit of a reading binge this week. I've finished two books and I'm about to finish a third, which is rare since I'm a slow reader.
It's helped that they've been entertaining.
On that note, I just finished JPod by Douglas Coupland, a book set in the video game industry. On the level of pure entertainment, I think it's one of the funniest books ever written.
And it's got all the Coupland strengths -- brilliantly-crafted, well-defined quirky characters, easy prose, and highly original figurative language. Also, Coupland is one of the few novelists who can actually write an office environment well, probably because he's one of the few who's been there.
But I found as I got farther into it that I began recommending it to fewer and fewer people. The book has some serious flaws.
The first of these is the filler. Most of this is built around the games played around the office as part of their daily procrastination -- "Write a love letter to Ronald Mcdonald" or "Write an ad for yourself on eBay." Those two were funny. But when they play pick-out-the-one-non-prime-number-in-ten-pages-of-primes or find-the-one-wrong-digit-of-pi-calculated-to-ten-million-digits -- and actually reproduce those numbers -- I honestly wonder if he was just trying to up his page count.
The second is that his knowledge of organized crime seems to come entirely from TV news reports. Even I could tell that.
But the worst problem by far is the Mary-Suing. And yes, it still counts as being a Mary Sue if you insert yourself into your novel as a sociopathic monster, especially if you're an evil business genius, though I admit I laughed out loud when the narrator described the experience of looking into Coupland's "cold, dead eyes" as like looking into "a well of drowned toddlers."
Again, it's still worth the read, especially if you're looking for something easy and not too serious, and if you like video games. But I'm disappointed because he used to be so interesting. Coupland used to be finding soul and beauty into the the unlikeliest corners of the modern world. Now he's tipped over the ledge of postmodernism, and doesn't seem to care.
The world celebrated in JPod is the shallow and empty world Margaret Atwood's Crake destroys in Oryx and Crake. I kept expecting the characters to be popping BlyssPluss.
It's helped that they've been entertaining.
On that note, I just finished JPod by Douglas Coupland, a book set in the video game industry. On the level of pure entertainment, I think it's one of the funniest books ever written.
And it's got all the Coupland strengths -- brilliantly-crafted, well-defined quirky characters, easy prose, and highly original figurative language. Also, Coupland is one of the few novelists who can actually write an office environment well, probably because he's one of the few who's been there.
But I found as I got farther into it that I began recommending it to fewer and fewer people. The book has some serious flaws.
The first of these is the filler. Most of this is built around the games played around the office as part of their daily procrastination -- "Write a love letter to Ronald Mcdonald" or "Write an ad for yourself on eBay." Those two were funny. But when they play pick-out-the-one-non-prime-number-in-ten-pages-of-primes or find-the-one-wrong-digit-of-pi-calculated-to-ten-million-digits -- and actually reproduce those numbers -- I honestly wonder if he was just trying to up his page count.
The second is that his knowledge of organized crime seems to come entirely from TV news reports. Even I could tell that.
But the worst problem by far is the Mary-Suing. And yes, it still counts as being a Mary Sue if you insert yourself into your novel as a sociopathic monster, especially if you're an evil business genius, though I admit I laughed out loud when the narrator described the experience of looking into Coupland's "cold, dead eyes" as like looking into "a well of drowned toddlers."
Again, it's still worth the read, especially if you're looking for something easy and not too serious, and if you like video games. But I'm disappointed because he used to be so interesting. Coupland used to be finding soul and beauty into the the unlikeliest corners of the modern world. Now he's tipped over the ledge of postmodernism, and doesn't seem to care.
The world celebrated in JPod is the shallow and empty world Margaret Atwood's Crake destroys in Oryx and Crake. I kept expecting the characters to be popping BlyssPluss.