Customer Reviews

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Douglas Coupland created the name of an entire generation in "Generation X," with his look at the lives of disaffected twentysomethings, in lives that lack an indefinable something. Witty, incisive and intelligent, Coupland's debut is still an outstanding read long after the original twentysomethings are twentysomething no more.

Three twentysomethings -- Andy, Claire, and Dag -- first encounter each other in the California desert, far from their original homes. All three are "underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable," and they are adrift in life -- they want meaning in their lives, but they don't know what it is or how to find it.

Disgruntled by the soulles pop culture, they've all left the world behind in favor of a non-rat-race life. They take up unrewarding minimum-wage "McJobs," and form a little Platonic circle that tells stories about themselves and the future, giving insights into what drove them to that place in the first place.

"Generation X" is one of those rare books that takes on the problems of youth with genuine intelligence. No matter how many curmudgeons say that "kids today have it easy," each generation has its own problems and challenges, including ones of the soul. It's those problems that Coupland seeks to address here.

That intelligent edge has gotten the book labelled pretentious, but if anything it lacks pretension. Coupland is frank and upfront, both about his "slacker" protagonists, and in the attitude he has toward the world. He tackles the insecurities and dissatisfactions of youth, and how the people who came of age in the early 1990s struggled with the concept of a society in flux. They were too old to be innocent, too young to be fully benumbed.

Coupland's writing is rougher here than in his later novels like "Shampoo Nation" and "Girlfriend in a Coma." But it has his usual wry zing and offbeat style, stripped down to a mass of details and thoughts, and the ability to look at how the masses worry about things that don't really matter. He's cynical and dark in places, but has a certain downbeat optimism as well.

Douglas Coupland's debut has a languid, downbeat beauty about it. And the insightful "Generation X" is still a modern classic, with something to say to any generation.

Douglas Coupland's cynicism is convulted and shallow and while I can see what some people can get out of his writing I see far more potential in reading "fin-de-siecle'' existentialist writers like musil, gombrowicz, broch, whom are terribly more interesting than Coupland with his cheap irony, and his gimmicky pseudo-post-modernism. Chuck Paliniuk also falls under this category. So while i was first disturbed by the amount of people calling this book boring, dismissing it as the problem of the reader, I now fully sympathize with their inability to appreciate coupland's writing.

There are too many terrific books to waste time on this overrated work.

Maybe because I am a Gen-Xer, I loved this book. It captures the drifting meaninglessness that was the hallmark of coming of age as in the 80s. So often misunderstood, painted as the "me generation", Gen-X had to bridge the grandiose expectations of the Boomers and the famine of possibilities that was leftover.

Douglas Coupland coined the term "Generation X" with this novel. Though the term itself became a horrible fad, Coupland captured the zeitgeist and the spiritual problems of the post-boomer generation with unparalleled aptitude. This is my third Coupland book, and with it he has secured a place as my favorite fiction author.

The story is of three friends, Andy, Dag, and Claire, who have rejected consumer-culture and the cubicle-bound rat-race. They live out in the desert, work low-pay, no-future 'McJobs', drink, and pass time telling stories. These 'bedtime' stories are one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. Nuclear annihilation and a fantastical asteroid-world forever stuck suburban 1974 both play a role, as well as true stories no less strange and disturbing.

The book is surely critical of contemporary culture, of the drudgery of office jobs and the corporate rat-race, of consumerism, of the values and meanings inherited from the previous generation. Though it does this quite well, this wouldn't be enough for a great book. But the book is also forward-looking, and this is probably its strongest point. Andy, Dag, and Claire are in a sense rebuilding culture for themselves out in the desert. Coupland's gift for disarmingly touching moments and optimistic vision not only match his cultural critique, they are the things that will stick with you.

Coincidentally, the first novel I read by Coupland also happens to be the first novel he wrote. It follows the lives of Andy, Dag, and Claire. Late 20-ish adults who are living in the desert, doing basically nothing with their lives but telling each other stories. The story is told from Andy's point of view.

This novel sent me through a gamut of emotions. I called it everything from pretentious to decent. It had the ability to depress while entertaining. I found the beginning dreadfully dull to the point that I didn't know if I would continue or not, and I didn't truly get into the book until the introduction of Elvissa and Tobias. After that, the stories they told one another seemed to get better.

At first, I thought the characters were just pathetic. They didn't seem to have any ambition and all they did was tell each other stories. In fact, I will paste what I wrote in my personal journal about this book. I asked Nick (my friend) if he thought this is what our parents do? Do they sit around waxing nostalgic by making up stories about people, stories that correlate to their own miserable life?

The characters in the book are--or should be if they aged--around the age of my own parents. One character in the book said he was 15 in the late seventies. Hell, my mother wasn't 15 until the early 80's, making him technically older than her. Yes, I have very young parents, considering that I am 21. But I digress.

Then, an even scarier thought came to us. Would we act like them at that age? Would we get fed up with a no-end job and move to the west coast to live in bungalow-style houses and work a dead end job? Would the burden of being adults kill our spirit and make us run for the hills? Would we sit around one day telling apocalyptic stories about the end of the world because maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't mind if the world did just that -- end?

Things did get better for the characters, if better is the right choice of wording, at the end for the characters. They all seemed to have a sort of epiphany (with Claire's ability to get over her obsession being my favorite). While this novel didn't just make gape in awe (and I think a lot of that had do with the fact of my age), I do think that Coupland is a talented writer, and I do look forward to reading some of his other works.

From: not one to be labeled

So where did the term "Generation X" come from? Before it became a buzzword fad? Before it became a label, oversimplified and over-generalized marketing term? Unwittingly and not by choice, from Douglas Coupland, who authored this unique book, which was written and published in 1991. The chapters of this book say a lot about the theme and the mentality of the characters in "Generation X." Here are some of the chapter titles: I Am Not a Target Market, Dead at 30 Buried at 70, Shopping Is Not Creating, Purchased Experiences Don't Count, Define Normal, MTV Not Bullets, Quit Your Job, Our Parents Had More.

There is an "individualist" tract in this book within the confines of the circumstances that this cohort (age group) is culturally and economically confronted with. How does this cohort (age group) accept, reject, or redefine its values living under this paradigm and these circumstances? Conditions which will continue throughout their lifetimes?

Sometimes latent consternation and cynicism appears between the lines with these characters more than they are presented in an explicit way. But I don't think it is "angst" or "angst of a new generation" because that concept is another marketing term, and can be applied to the previous generations of the 1960s, 1920s, and throughout the annals of history. Who created that (marketing) angst label, I don't know. But people who use it have been reading, and definitely WRITING too many of the modern-day pop rags like "Rolling Stone," and watching too much T.V.

In the dialog and story the characters display some form of cross generational material envy, but they don't always project a complete rejection of materialism in this book. However, I don't see sour grapes either. Make sense? Like many others, I added too many outside influences of my own perceptions and experiences into this book. This is a story. Characters. Their stories, their lives and philosophies, are in this book. It's not about a generation, but I believe it is about a particular sub-culture that exists within a generation. To stereotype millions of people born over a several year period and pigeon-hole them into what they allegedly think, buy, feel, like and dislike is to paint with too broad of brush.
Coupland never intended to do this, but those who absconded with his title for this book, certainly did.

For those of us who read "Gen X" years after it was released in 1991, our minds have already been diluted and our thoughts and perceptions have been influenced by the progression of the 1990s decade and the media representations of it. Today in 2003, with the massive exporting of American jobs overseas, higher rates of taxation, declining wages, high job turnover, and increasingly longer work-weeks, this book can reflect today, and it can reflect other generations. There are many of this book's characters in our world today--and they are in their 40s and 50s now. Their physical circumstances are the same, but their mentality is different. Their minds have already been molded.

For a person to be an individual who chooses to live their own life (rare today in America) they don't have to reject mainstream society nor the major cultural norms of it. They simply have to embrace what they like, believe in, and want in their lives and do it. Often, people think that real-life folks who live like the characters in this book are "rejectionists" in some form when in fact they are not. They are simply living the way they want to. And, in the instance of this book the characters' lives follow along a different path that most people follow. Everyone's interpretation is different. But Copeland and these characters reflect a setting and environment, that includes the mentality and actions of a lot of people, and not just those of the Gen Xers, when he wrote this 12 years ago. A lot of the latter Boomers (b. 1950 or later) are experiencing similar phenomena as Dag, Andrew, Claire and Tyler.

Written in 1991 it's just as relevant today in 2003, because the economic fundamentals are still the same, minus the brief interruption of the short lived techie and dot.bomb boom. A temporary bubble that made a lot of people think that things were going OK, or even getting better. Well, things are still progressing as they were when this was written.

There are many definitions to terms at the bottom of the pages of this book. There are many great ones. Here are a few:

Air family: Describes the false sense of community experienced among co-workers in an office environment (page 127).

Yuppie Wannabees: An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse....(page 104).

Ozmosis: The inability of one's job to live up to on'e self-image (page 30).

Brazilification: The widening gulf between the right and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle class (page 13).

Expatriate Slopsism: When arriving in a foreign travel destination one had hoped was undiscovered, only to find many people just like oneself (are there); the peeved refusal to talk to said people because they have ruined one's elitist travel fantasy (page 200).

Tele-parabilizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: "That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!" (page 138).

The enormous amount of media hype that surrounded this novel when it first came out, and its rather gimmicky packaging (the book is hugely and pointlessly square and has a screed of weird aphorisms sprinkled around its super-wide margins) can make it easy to overlook the fact that Douglas Coupland really does have the goods as a writer. His characters here and in the more mature and carefully composed _Microserfs_ are full of life and instantly likeable. And in spite of his earnest and perhaps rather un-self-critical efforts to map the Zeitgeist, Coupland's enormous linguistic gifts and his virtuosity with the mechanisms of the frame-narrative actually made me think of Chaucer more than anybody else. _Generation X_ is a kind of contemporary _Canterbury Tales_, maybe?

I docked this novel one star for a simple reason - it doesn't have an ending. Instead it rather infelicitously trails off into the sort of trite sociology that was so faddish back in the early 90s when so many of us really had nothing better to do but sit around comparing our economic prospects with those of our parents. Is it really such a historical disaster that so many of us who were born into the middle classes in the late 60s and early 70s are going to have to swallow a few extra bags of Ramen noodles over the course of our adult lives? Get over it, people!

This is one of few books that I've bought and read and re-read and re-read, and can wholeheartedly recommend for all readers. Buy it without hesitation.

This book (Generation X) is the first book by Douglas Coupland that I read, and I believe his first work period. If I were teaching a class about "my generation" (I'm 27 now), I'd make this book required reading. Doug Coupland has written a work of fiction that covers the lives of three friends, from the point of view of one of them, which details the media-saturated, self-aware (to the point of paranoid self-analysis), over-educated and under-employed plight of many of my peers.

Coupland's style is one that I find very easy to read, very conversational. He transitions back and forth between dialogue and soliloquy, and gives us backgrounds and histories for all of the major characters. If you yourself are between the ages of 25 and 35, then you KNOW these people. Their habits, their childhoods, their schooling and careers are all things we've gone through. I really think this book will end up a generational milestone, becoming for my generation what "The Graduate" was for our parents.

If you've read "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", this has a similar flavor; I prefer Coupland's writing to Eggers', but I've read more of his work. The self-obsession of his characters isn't as distracting or heavy-handed as Eggers' own self-obsession, and it makes his characters more sympathetic. Since picking up "Generation X", I've read all of Coupland's other books....my favorites were "Girlfriend in a Coma" and "MicroSerfs". Can't wait to see what comes next!

Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez

I liked 'Generation X' a lot, but I suspect the appeal of this book might not be universal - I liked it because I recognized scenarios, personalities, attitudes and angst that I've seen among my friends and peers; I'm not sure if someone of my parents' generation would get much out of it. Still, Coupland shows his trademark wit and careful observation; he's given to bizarre but dead-on descriptions like, "I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored...in a Portland, Oregon basement." 'Generation X' is clearly a first novel, not as polished as subsequent Coupland works, but you can clearly see themes of disconnection and pop culture developing here that appear in his other works as well. It's a quick read and well worth it if you're a Coupland fan or a 30-something.

It was with a sense of ironic nostalgia that I picked up a copy of "Generation X" in the used bookstore last month. I enjoyed reading it almost a decade ago as I ran from/toward my post-college life in a city and climate I had never lived in before. The fact that the three principal characters were doing essentially the same thing I was struck a few chords of identification back then. Andrew from Oregon, Dagmar from L.A. and Claire from the country club world make a fun Platonic threesome, "dropping out" of society by working "McJobs" in Palm Springs. Though slightly younger than the narrator's younger brother, Tyler, I recognized much of the existential angst of growing up in a throwaway, mass pop culture. And I am also old enough to remember the constant threat of nuclear holocaust (or nucular, as the undereducated pseudo-cowboy occupying 1600 Pennsylvania would have you believe--see p. 165 for definition of "Obscurism") which permeates the novel.

The world has improved in some ways since this book came out in 1991 when college grads were being welcomed by the worst economic environment for entry-level positions since the Great Depression, but don't tell that to the poor kids graduating next May. Over the last decade many GenX'ers found out that yes, they could do better than their parents after all, but then narrator Andrew Palmer would be quick to question the definition of "better."

Every generation thinks it's so tough and that the whiny young kids of today have it easier than they did. The intelligent social observer will appreciate that challenges DIFFER from generation to generation--it's the lucky ones, not necessarily the weak ones, that don't have to fight wars to save the world from Hitler, stop the red menace in the jungle, or comb the deserts to keep the oilmen in power and SUV drivers in their high and mighty heated seats. Generation X is a marketing term pretty effective in its day; it's also a demographic that will be running your world in the next ten to fifteen years. "Generation X" is a curious and entertaining novel. It's an insightful commentary about those who want to overcome the vapid and exploitative advertising culture that helped shape their characters whether they liked it or not. It's worth the re-read, and if you haven't, it's worth a first read.