Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

I've been thinking about why I still love this book, when I hate movies like Lost in Translation and Reality Bites. I think it's because the characters are so active; Andy, Dag and Claire don't lie around hotel rooms in their underwear or have "planet[s] of regret" on their shoulders (shut up, Ethan Hawke). They have jobs, they do interesting things, they daydream, and most importantly, they tell each other stories. On the flip side, they haven't aggressively dropped out of the mainstream a la Kerouac &co. They're just trying to find their way along some other path than the one they were told to be on, and they try to find some quiet meaning in their lives as they go, without being too consciously hip, or too unconsciously *un*hip. The book never feels forced, and it's the author's gentle tone that makes it work for me.

I give this book five stars even though it really isn't much of a novel, it's mainly just three kids telling stories about how they view the creepy world of consumerism and status. I read this shortly after returning to the States after living a fairly idyllic and isolated life on the Mediterranean for three blissful years. I didn’t really get America when I got back, not at all. This was the first novel that I read that explained why I wasn’t entirely crazy for not being crazy for the American dream.

So, I had just moved from Greece (probably the best place I have ever lived, and I’ve lived in some great places; I’ve lived in Spain for the last 12 years) and I moved to suburban Washington, D.C., the worst fucking place I have ever lived. I just hated the traffic and endless sprawl (I didn’t even have the word “sprawl” in my vocabulary at that time; I just knew that I hated it).

My brother turned me on to this book after he had also been recently reintroduced to American culture. A lot of things in this book just hit home with me. Granted, I thought the male characters were way too soft for me and one of them, I felt, should have been screwing Claire, but the sexless nature of the males wasn’t a big problem. What drew me to the book more than anything was simply the tone, and the tone was “Is this really what it’s all about? Filling an SUV with a wife and family and taking two weeks a year on the beach somewhere?”

I knew that wasn’t for me.

He had a lot of great insights in this book, which is more than you can say for a lot of novels by the leading writers in America. I defy anyone to quote a decent insight of our culture from John Irving, Joyce Carrol Oates, Saul Bellow, or most of the pantheon of modern American literature (and yes, I know this dude is Canadian).

This was the first novel that I read that questioned the American Dream or traditional values. It was the first time I heard anyone voice criticism towards what most considered the normal trajectory of adult life. All that I knew at the time was that the idea of going the route expected of people of my station had zero appeal to me. This book sort of let me know that I wasn’t alone.

Postscript:

You have to wonder if anyone from the Cell Phone-Facebook-Twitter-Video Game generation would even be capable of the sort of introspection found in this novel. I hate to stir up class warfare (What am I saying? I love stirring up class warfare!) but I doubt children of any sort of privileged status would even feel compelled to bother deconstructing their baffling world...at least it’s baffling to me. What would they call their book? Generation Like. Generation LOL, Genreation Chat-Click-Swipe, or maybe Generation Whatever?

Credited with terming low-paying/low-status/unsatisfying/dead-end employment as a "McJob" and introducing/popularizing the phrase "Generation X" to the American lexicon, Coupland conveys the lives of three friends as they attempt to escape their collective quarter-life crisis. Using a raw ironic tone that is anything less than subtle, Generation X entwines the exhausted lives of twentysomethings with relevant pop culture references. Choice moments in the novel include Coupland's incorporation of cartoons, slogans and Couplandisms, all of which are specific to the sentiments portrayed by both the characters and the author himself. "Tele-parabolizing" is a personal favorite of Coupland's invented terms which is defined as describing everyday morals by using widely known plots found on television (think, "that's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!"). Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture may not cure your frustration with our culture's habit of excessive consumption and extreme commercialism, but it will at least provide you with the solace of knowing you're not alone.

Douglas Coupland's critically and commercially acclaimed dark comedy looking at three people dropping out of the rat race, who with nothing to do, tell each other stories, as they try to live on on the outskirts of the mainstream. 6 out of 12.

I lived in Europe the entire second half of the 1980s and became completely detached from American culture. When I returned in the early 90s I felt like an alien, thoroughly incapable of understanding all the changes that had occurred while I was away those many years. Coupland's novel Generation X contained so many interesting observations and fundamental truisms about where American culture was going that it helped me grasp all the weirdness I too had observed since returning.

I remember being totally fixated with television the first month I returned; so many cable channels and so much mindless and useless quasi-entertainment, and yet I couldn't get enough! And it was TV commercials that fascinated me the most, the way they made you feel as if you're a fucking loser if you didn't own what they were selling, whether it was the product itself or the persona that went along with the purchase; to be cool was to have ownership of the item and the hope of what this brought to your banal, mundane, loser life. I'm sure marketing and advertising had always promoted this idea since it first began, but with 24/7 cable TV one could relentlessly perpetuate this idea with greater efficacy and volume.

Moreover, my first post-military job was a difficult transition as I was clueless about how civilians conducted themselves in the workplace, with much different attitudes about work ethic, goals, and social interaction than how it was in the Army. I was overwhelmed and angst-ridden those first six months. The military had simple rules, lines of authority, and ideas about teamwork and goals within that framework.

In the civilian world, the workplace was a complex minefield of confusing and baffling unwritten rules and attitudes that were wholly alien to me. People were more sensitive and less diligent, and leadership at every level was cowardly and passive-aggressive for the most part. In the military among my comrades, trust was one of the most absolute givens between us; we had each others backs because it was the only way to survive in a crisis situation. In the civilian workplace, trust was a laughable joke at best; no one had your back, and, in fact, getting stabbed in the back was a daily event even with those you thought you could trust. In the military, acts of selfless magnanimity were the norm; in the civilian workplace people were selfish and solipsistic. It was a confusing mess for me.

About that time I read Generation X, and its narrative helped calm me as the characters more or less echoed many of the sentiments I was experiencing as I re-entered American civilian life. There's really not much going on in the book except the characters expressing their thoughts, feelings, and anxieties about modern life as young adults trying to find their way in the last two decades of the 20th Century. I found their narratives to be fascinating, helpful, and best of all, their views were affirming many of my own.

It's a great book, revolutionary in some ways, as Coupland rightfully shows that people born after 1960 were not "Boomers" and part of that immense generation of Americans. People of Gen X were somewhere off on their own, less affected by the 1960s than the Boomers, and lost and confused during the rightward political shift of the Reagan years and the mass corporatization of work, art, and culture that happened in the 80s. Mass marketing was turning kids into mindless consumers, work was becoming impersonal with the rise of beehive-like "cubicle" work environments, and it was becoming difficult to find individual identity in an age of mass conformity and mass marketing.

Even the term Generation X, which was the name of a legendary but obscure English punk band from the 70s, was itself usurped by the marketing lords and turned into another capitalized, mass marketed, faux youth trend in the 90s. One second it was the theme of a great idea by a brilliant young novelist, the next it was used to sell clothes, music, soft drinks, and other affectations of a phony, pre-packaged lifestyle. Luckily Coupland's novel came out well before the ridiculous commercialization of his ideas.

It's difficult today to understand the immense impact this novel had when it was first published in 1991. As an ex-pat returning home after years of living abroad, I found the novel monumentally important as I tried to find my way back into the strange, new culture that was America in the 1990s. In many ways, some 25 years later, I have yet to fully return.

Young white privilege all dressed up and no where to go

Αγορασμένο ενώ έμενα σε ένα μικρό χωριό πριν από 25 χρόνια ίσως και παραπάνω (δραχμές 3.120) από το βιβλιοπωλείο της διπλανής κωμόπολης, το οποίο υπάρχει ακόμη , ενώ πήγαινα (αργότερα) φροντιστήριο στην πρωτεύουσα του νομού (το φροντιστήριο δεν υπάρχει εδώ και πολλά χρόνια) με μόνη φιλοδοξία να περάσω οπουδήποτε για να πιω καπουτσίνο, ο οποίος στα μάτια μου φάνταζε πολύ εκλεπτυσμένος καφές (μιλάμε για φιλοδοξίες, όχι αστεία). Αγαπητοί μιλλένιαλς : ξεχάστε τις αλυσίδες των καφέ, ξεχάστε τις μηχανές εσπρέσσο σε κάθε σπίτι (θέλω να πάρω εσπρεσσιέρα εδώ και μια 10ετια, είπαμε φιλοδοξίες, όχι αστεία), έμενα σε χωριό λέμε, οι γειτόνισσες πήγαιναν η μία στην άλλη πίνοντας ελληνικούς καφέδες, ενώ στις καφετέριες (πήγα σε καφετέρια όταν μας έβγαλαν στο φροντιστήριο λίγο πριν τις πανελλήνιες) και στα φοιτητικά σπίτια πίνανε χτυπημένο με το κουτάλι "νες". Και στα φοιτητικά σπίτια ζέσταιναν νερό με το μπρίκι, δεν μιλάμε καν για βραστήρες. Μεγάλωσα σε χωριό που πήγαινες στον μπακάλη να ζητήσεις φέτα και έλεγε "δεν έχομε" (sic). Φέτα σου ζήτησα, όχι καμαμπέρ.
Ζώντας λοιπόν στο Κολοκωτρονίτσι δεν ξέρω τι με τράβηξε σε αυτό το βιβλίο (ίσως το τόσο meta ντιζάιν του με τις ποπ αρτ εικόνες του και τις βινιέτες του στα περιθώρια;) Τι σχέση είχα εγώ το παιδί από το χωριό με αυτές τις ποπ ιστορίες της Αμερικής; Τι σχέση εγώ με τους ήρωες τώρα που το ξαναματαδιαβάζω στα πλαίσια rereading σε μια μανιώδη προσπάθεια μαζικής εκκαθάρισης της βιβλιοθήκης μου (ήδη έδωσα 119 βιβλία, και θα δώσω άλλα 75 (;) βιβλία τουλάχιστον); Οι ήρωες είναι πιο pretentious από τον Βαρουφάκη, οι διάλογοι είναι νέος ελληνικός κινηματογράφος on steroids, δεν υπάρχει πλοκή, απλά οι χαρακτήρες διηγούνται ιστορίες από το τέλος του κόσμου (θραύσματα ιστοριών ακόμη θυμόμουν). Θα μπορούσα με την ίδια ευκολία να βάλω ένα αστεράκι όσο και ένα εκατομμύριο αστεράκια. Δεν θα ήθελα ούτε να περάσω δίπλα από τα γελοία white privileged ατομάκια που έχει για ήρωες ο συγγραφεύς που νομίζουν ότι είναι τόσο meta (ψευδοεπαναστάτες της πορδής, ζαίοι πριν τους ζαίους) και που φαντάζονται το τέλος του κόσμου στην ουρά των ταμείων ενός σουπερ μάρκετ. Wait...

Does the term "overload" make or break the novel? Lets just say that in its o-so 80's rampantly materialistic take on self-imposed post mid-twenty crisis survivors, the book may want to break itself! This is the equivalent of what "Reality Bites" was to film: zeitgeisty, important, conspicuous.

It is a fun lexicon like novel that reads like The Decameron or the Canterbury Tales in modern day. The protagonists (don't know it but actually) live in an age where nothing is happening and so the stories they tell themselves atop their middleclass hill both alienate them from the events of the country and transforms them into monolithic figures. Okay, they bitch (these X-ers) like any new generation that becomes conscious of its own incongruities... but lounging by the pool? Clearly they had it better than us, & we may have it better than our (yikes!) children... In my generation, well, let's just say I am super glad to pay a kings ransom for my Cap Hill Lladro-priced matchbox apt.! The stories all come from spiritual castaways (in their bourgeois splendor they try hard to break from), including, obviously, the too cool author. That they all bear the same register of tone, the same intelligent tone, gives the work a more realistic splendor that's richly inventive, playfully evocative.