I always approach a Douglas Coupland book with a little trepidation. I have liked the ones I have read, but always worry that 12 pages of random numbers in the middle or the same word in eight different font sizes over a pair of pages will make me slam my head against the wall.

In the end, the strange literary additions didn’t make me roll my eyes at a Coupland novel. Coupland himself did.

jPod purports to be a companion to the outstanding Microserfs, which described the lives of a young group of Microsoft employees who eventually strike out on their own to create a video game. That book covered a multitude of emotional topics, many of which popped up in jPod. The problem for me came in the form of a character which did not appear in the first book.

Coupland himself. He ruined his own book.

At first, it was kind of funny that, in the midst of all the shenanigans, the narrator met Coupland. Ha, ha. If you have the career he has had, you have the right to throw yourself in a book. But when Coupland’s presence played a critical role in how the characters related to one another, the whole plot went off the tracks.

The book had a weird vibe to begin with, much weirder than Microserfs. Why take it over the edge by inserting the author who is deified by the characters and ends up leading them toward the ultimate conclusion? Does Coupland need a hug that badly? They have machines for that now, I hear.

I’ll still love Microserfs and have great memories of Generation X and Miss Wyoming, but I’m going to try and forget jPod.