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Product Details
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (March 15, 1991)
'Generation X' by Douglas Coupland is a disjointed novel about a cynical and sarcastic generation. 'We Didn't Start the Fire' could be its theme song. Coupland's characters live barren lives in a barren land. They don't want to 'spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.' The author tries to get all his facts in about society. He must be good at playing Trivia.'
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As a fellow Gen Xer, I found a degree of humor in Douglas Coupland’s novel about three lost souls trying find some sort of meaning to their aimless lives. Far from honestly portraying the generation as a whole, GENERATION X focuses on a more popular segment that, at least in my eyes, is more aptly described as the “MTV Generation”.
Coupland’s story centers around three friends (2 males and 1 female) that illustrate their genre’s penchant for having all the education, but little focus on leading productive lives. Ever observant and critical of everything ranging from “Yuppies” (also fellow Gen Xers) to those enslaved to the endless cycle of working lame jobs (defined as “McJobs”), this trio considers most of the world boring and beneath them. Lost souls filled with too much self-importance and knowledge to waste time working … leaving a lot of time to kill. In order to exercise over-stuffed brains, they prefer to engage in hipster-speak banter to demonstrate a perceived sense of higher self-awareness peppered with a nostalgic twinge of yesteryear (when things seemed to matter).
GENERATION X is somewhat of a tedious read as nothing really happens … like reading a Seinfeld script sans the humor. Gen X “buzzwords” (and their definitions) line the margins of the book throughout. The lingo (of which some was familiar) all seems to echo sentiments of a bored, unhappy and useless generation … yearning to be part of something important. While Generation X is defined as those born in the early 60s through the early 80s, the book really doesn’t look at the generation as a whole, but a niche within. Looking back, I can actually see the contents of GENERATION X being played out in my college and immediate post-college years … by the avant-garde crowd.Read more ›
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This is the story of a handful of Generation X-ers, defined as people born between 1960 and 1980.
In the book three late-twenty somethings - Andy, Claire, and Dag - separately give up their upwardly mobile jobs and move to Palm Springs, California. There they take up residence in modest digs, take low-paying service jobs, and attempt to live more or less minimalist lives. They entertain themselves by telling stories (made up or real), drinking, snacking, having picnics, and - for the most part - eschewing serious relationships. Their purpose, apparently, is to reject traditional society and its values, which they find oppressive. Though the characters reject the values of their nuclear families (which are not perfect, but whose family is?) they do maintain contact via phone calls, visits, and so on....so their isolation is not complete.
Though the hippie-ish lifestyle of Andy and his friends/acquaintances is amusing to read about, it strikes the reader (at least this reader) as unrealistic and unsustainable. Though a small segment of society can decide to do 'nothing' with their lives and suffer few consequences - if everyone took up this lifestyle the country's economy would soon collapse. And even for those who are determined to stick it out, this kind of freewheeling behavior becomes unattractive when people are no longer 'young' (that is, approach their mid-thirties and older).
The main characters try to be committed to their 'no-strings' lifestyle, but life does impinge: Claire develops a huge crush on Tobias, an exceptionally handsome man - and follows him to New York - where their lives don't mesh. Dag is attracted to Claire's friend Elvissa, and tries to develop a relationship with her - until Elvissa skips town for an even more minimal lifestyle.Read more ›
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Back in 1989 a little known Canadian writer called Douglas Coupland (pronounced Copeland), took off for the Californian desert city of Palm Springs to write a handbook for the post boomer generation, or at least that's what his publisher thought. It turned out Coupland had other ideas and "Generation X" was his first attempt at fiction. The story goes that when he turned in the manuscript his publisher was aghast and it was only at the prompting of younger staff whom identified with it that it was finally published. In time the book became a huge success, and in what is probably the biggest irony in a book seemingly defined by it, the title became the term used by marketing and the media to identify a generation whose motto could easily have been the title of one of its chapters: "I Am Not a Target Market".
Whilst Coupland denied he was ever the spokesperson for a generation or that Gen X was ever more than a collection of attitudes and behaviors, I think he captured something important. His words resonated with young people of a certain age who didn't identify with the boomer mentality and looked for cultural markers that more closely matched their own experience.
I first came across Gen X a decade ago in a London bookstore, and it certainly provided welcome relief from the rain and rigors of day to day living. Sometimes it's scary to see how tenuous the thread of meaning is in ones existence, in those days held together by little more than a few good books and the odd day spent goofing off work. I'm put in mind of a day many years ago; I was at Heathrow Airport, a regular haunt for me then, and I realized I would not remember the endless, crappy days spent doing meaningless jobs, so unimportant were they in the overall scheme of things.Read more ›
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This item: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
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