John Dugdale
Carry on Coupland
Recent offerings from Douglas Coupland have taken on such serious themes as the breakdown of the family (All Families Are Psychotic) and high-school shootings (Hey, Nostradamus!), convincingly showing that there’s more to the Canadian writer than spotting social trends and recording the speech patterns and pop-culture obsessions of Generation X. In JPod, however, he takes a break from this new-found earnestness, producing a novel that’s almost free of darkness.
Its main characters are six programmers employed by a corporation that makes computer games. Called ‘podsters’ because they work in a set of cubicles called JPod, they recall several of Coupland’s earlier trademark bands of the young and youngish,
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553