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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Kai Maristed
What's new here? For one thing, however hit or miss the lobbed content, Coupland's writing style is vastly improved. And "JPod" turns out to be the perfect vehicle for his funny and poignant evocations of near-term nostalgia. [6 May 2006, p.E4]
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Favorable
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Slate Michael Agger
In JPod, Coupland still turns fine phrases... but his connection to quotidian life is fainter than ever.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Dave Itzkoff
It is a work in which his familiar misgivings about life on the technological cusp are again invoked, but also one in which the skills he's been developing as a novelist pay off, where his satirical streak and his social consciousness finally stop fooling around with each other and settle down together.
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Favorable
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USA Today David Daley
Imagine a cocktail of The Office, Weeds and Wired magazine, shaken not stirred.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Natasha Cica
Coupland's publicists are right: JPod is "very evil ... and very funny".
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] T.F. Rigelhof
A seriously funny book.
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Favorable
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The Independent Matt Thorne
I used to think Coupland was slightly too benign a novelist. Now he feels like one of the most nihilistic: a change that has improved his fiction immeasurably.
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Favorable
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The Observer John Elek
JPod is without a doubt his strongest, best-observed novel since Microserfs.
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Matthew Reynolds
It is an extraordinary book, wide-ranging and wildly inventive yet also overwhelmingly drab.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
Coupland derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters.
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Mixed
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The Spectator William Brett
While JPod is as virtuoso, as culturally sharp and as funny as we have come to expect from Coupland, its obsession with contemporary culture - with nailing the zeitgeist - leaves it lacking as a novel.
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Mixed
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The Independent Scarlett Thomas
Is this is a sickeningly realistic portrait of postmodern culture? Or is it a product that's so easy to consume you can keep MTV on in the background while you read it? It's actually very hard to tell.
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Mixed
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Washington Post John Freeman
Aggressively clever and yet oddly forgettable.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Sam Leith
Coupland is looking a bit like a novelist who doesn't have a novel to write, but writes it anyway.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Mark Sanderson
Coupland may be up to his old tricks of satirising corporate culture and channel-surfing the Zeitgeist but his refusal to be judgemental about anything - substance abuse, infidelity, murder - draws the sting of his sharp-eyed observations.
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Patrick Ness
At the very least, it makes for a quick read because there are so many pages you can skip.
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Unfavorable
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PopMatters Jason B. Jones
If Microserfs was up-to-the-minute, JPod is a few months behind--and in our modern world, this means it might as well be issued on papyrus.
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Terrible
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Village Voice Dennis Lim
It reads as if the author, routinely patronized as a marketing savant, zeitgeist chaser, and slick neologist throughout his career, had absorbed every single negative criticism of his work and set out to confirm them all with self-loathing vigor. Accordingly, JPod is smug, vacuous, easily distracted, and often supremely irritating.
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