SOURCE.

What passes for cute in your twenties is often tragic in your forties. In that respect, Jpod doesn't so much revisit Microserfs as it does rip that earlier novel off—poorly—and that's a real tragedy. Douglas Coupland clearly had a couple of good yarns in him, but over time his biting irony has calcified into bitterness and his acute bead on pop culture has lapsed into a lazy litany of hyphenated consumer references. Jpod is so disposable it should come with an expiration date. I won't even get into the author's tedious attempt at "flexing" by writing himself into the story—which I suppose is meant to operate on some level of parody but exhibits at best a deluded sense of self-awareness. Dull-de-dull-dull. On the plus side, the text is so larded with badly typeset pictographic garbage that the book may be consumed in a couple of noncommittal shittings. Oops. Sittings.