Probably ironic insofar as it is a programmatic statement for lumpenized antisocial nihilists (not the sort who abide a programme, normally), which means that it is less LANish itself than metaLANish, a scholarly study that seeks to inhabit the ‘mind’ of the LAN and explore the contours thereof. Ultimately defines the group as

the shin jin rui--that’s what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office--new human beings. It’s hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it’s just as large, but it doesn’t have a name—an X generation—purposefully hiding itself. (56)

We note that though the phenomenon is indigenous in this conception, the text very carefully must describe it with reference to an international phenomenon, an interpenetration by free movement of peoples in the post-war period. Despite the international bona fides, X generation is post-market, annoyed that “our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value” (68). Even if it’s hiding itself, it’s not really a secret among the cool kids, as they might taunt each other with such insults as “fin de siècle existentialist poseur” (85). They display the normal proto-fascist nietzschean ennui in leaving “their old lives behind them and set forth to make new lives for themselves in the name of adventure,” during the course of which they search for “personal truth” and “willingly put themselves on the margins of society” (88). Rather, “when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact the history will never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied” (147). OH NOS!

X generation’s cynicism is complete, however: “You are such a victim, you pea-brained dimwit—no one believes the government” (77). Fairly illiberal to the extent it condemns “the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom feeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering” (81). Perfectly willing to mock others who want the same depth of lumpenization:

They’re nice kids. None of their folks can complain. They’re perky. They embrace and believe the pseudo-globalism and ersatz racial harmony of ad campaigns engineered by the makers of soft drinks and computer inventoried sweaters. […] But in some dark and undefinable way, these kids are also Dow, Union Carbide, General Dynamics, and the military. (106)

Those who “live in a permanent 1950s” “still believe in a greeting card future” (112); despite the “mild racist quirks and planet destroying peccadillos” of this type, “their existence acts as a tranquilizer in an otherwise slightly out-of-control world” (id.), which is the standard degeneracy language used by right-populists who seek regeneration of nation through spiritual renewal and manliness in war, incidentally.

Great enemies of this group are yuppies, normally, who “won in a genetic lottery […] having been born at the right moment in history” (21). Protagonists take a calvinist view of property acquisition, however, insofar as “I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can’t help but feeling that we didn’t merit it” (23), an odd conflation of self-loathing consumerism and anti-consumerist asceticism. Adopts an anti-Adorno position with “we’re not built for free time as a species” (id.), suggesting that most of us have “only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting” (24), which is kinda gross proto-fascistic talk.

Friend of mine saw me reading this and asked ‘Are you learning some good cliché aphorisms about yourself?’ which is a decent approximation. And I must admit, this is probably the easiest book that I’ve read in terms of situating myself inside it; it was indeed written for persons like me. (I suppose that means that the irreducible foundation of my ideological composition is lumpen antisocial nihilist?)

Narrator concedes in the opening that he acquired a “mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination” (3) at age fifteen and retained thereafter the same “ambivalence” at fifteen years later (4). Given this premise, it not difficult to understand that narrator is otherwise a mix of potentially inconsistent ideas: postmodern rootlessness (“where you’re from feels sort of irrelevant these days” (4)), economic dissatisfaction (“after eight hours of working his McJob (‘Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future’)” (5)), and proto-fascistic degeneracy theory conflated with fugly localism (“whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big” (id.)).

Part of the LAN ideological mix here is what Sloterdijk designated as ‘enlightened false consciousness’:

[deuteragonists] smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I have always wonder if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social convention to show their anger, who don’t want to look like poor sports. (7)

Narrators will adopt (on the next page, even) a second pomo conceit: “‘Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.’ I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert—to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales” (8) (NB this is erimo technis)—which is immediately recognizable as Baudrillard’s simulacrum argument, as delivered however by Zizek (& Laurence Fishburne): ‘Welcome to the desert of the real, motherfuckers.’ It becomes so ludicrous that deuteragonist must confirm “Wait […] this is a true story?” (54).

Text has a fine sense of humor, such as in comparing rich people shopping for luxuries to “hundreds of greedy little children who are so spoiled, and so impatient, that the can’t even wait for food to be prepared. They have to reach for live animals on the table and suck the food right out of them” (9). (Elsewise, however, narrator will note that “we had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity” (11), so he’s not immune.) The objection remains cultural, ‘spiritual,’ idealist, right-populist—rather than ‘the international proletariat starves because of exploitation,’ which is how a leftwing objection might read, by contrast.

Novel is printed on weird 7.75 x 8.875 paper (not a standard paper size); text is within the bounds of a typical octavo, whereas large margin is filled with ancient-seeming glosses and little cutesy graphics—an illuminated manuscript, as though text were scripture and marginal glosses are the comments by learned scribes of the monastery. In some ways the supplied marginalia is one of the best features of the novel, and provides at times the apparatus for reading, such as when, say, the gloss on ‘historical slumming’ suggests that one might visit ‘locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back ‘to the present’” (11). Similarly, ‘decade blending’ is “the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades” (15). Novel in text proper lays out its basic principle of reading:

I’ve seen the process of onedownmanship in action—and been angry at not having sordid enough tales of debauchery of my own to share. ‘Never be afraid to cough up a bit of diseased lung for spectators,’ said a man who sat next to me at a meeting once, a man with skin like a half-cooked pie crust and who had five grown children who would no longer take his phone calls: ‘How are people ever going to help themselves if they can’t grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that little fragment, they need it.’ I’m still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this. (13)

Novel proceeds along this objective, as narrator and deuteragonists share sub-narratives with regularity. We as readers might take note of the consistent slumming and onedownmanship in the narration, as it heads toward ugly right-populist and proto-fascistic conclusions.

Lays down slackerist principles such as “occupational slumming” (working below one’s abilities) (26). Also—“Voter’s block”: the "attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting” (80). But the slacker eventually comes to Hegelian confrontation:

”We all go through a crisis point, or, I suppose, or we’re not complete. I can’t tell you how many people I know who claim to have had a midlife crisis early in life. But there invariably comes a certain point where our youth fails us; […] But my crisis wasn’t just the failure of youth but also a failure of class and of sex and the future. (30)

Dude resolves this crisis by becoming Ballard’s protagonist from Crash: “I began to see this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantasize about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf to the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir” (31). Result: “All events become omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally” (id.), which is a distinctly nihilist position. Remedy: “I needed a clean slate with no one to read it. I needed to drop out even further. My life had become a series of scary incidents that simply weren’t stringing together to make for an interesting book” (id.). This last reveals that the nihilism is baudrillardian, born out of semiurgical overload, which requires the material historical world to mean more than its mere existence, and prescribes one’s life, making it adhere to the manifestly hyperreal narratives that precede the life in question. It’s all friggin’ gross, of course. (Dude will refer to his crew as “a blue jeans ad come to life” (54).)

This sort of semiurgical-excess nihilism (what Mieville might mean by ‘lumpen postmodern’) does not arise out of nothing (though the nihilist may believe as much), but is rather related plainly to the economic basis, “the year is permanently 1974, the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew ever again” (40). The X generation nihilist wants to tell his parents “that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear” (86)—cf. Griffin’s Modernism & Fascism, maybe? Much of the fear of futurelessness arises from nuclear warfare (plenty of images and sub-narratives there), including the great gloss on ‘strangelove reproduction’ wherein one has “children to make up for the fact that no one believes in the future” (135).

Part of the dysfunctional relation to the future is a pathological relation to the past. The Vietnam war in the US was “ugly times,” but “they were also the only times I’ll ever get—genuine capital H history times, before history turned into a press release […] In the bizarre absence of all time cues, I need a connection to a past of some importance” (151), a necessity for connection even to the Ugly, apparently.

There may be a bizarre anti-corporeality running through, too, such as being “disembodied from the vulgarities of gravity” (146). Protagonist notes that his father “discovered his body late in life” and sought to “deprogram himself of dietary fictions invented by railroaders, cattlemen, and petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms over the centuries” (142). Weird.

Recommended for those who think it unhealthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments, readers trying to erase all traces of history from their pasts, and the persons who unable to feel rooted, move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community.

I like the yuppie vocabulary in the footnotes, Tobias' rant, the Japanese story when Rilke is quoted...
I like the insightfulness of it all.

I dislike the 'feeling of filling' (sorry): you can sense that this book was asked to be written by a third party, that maybe it had to have a particular amount of pages, that maybe it was written too fast and didn't have the proper editing (not to mention that it would work much better as a collection of essays than fiction). I think it would be a better book if it had ~50 pages less.

I dislike the try-hard, self-regarding, somewhat obnoxious insightfulness of it all.

Douglas Coupland is largely sort of awful, but he didn't completely start out that way. There's a certain inspiration to his earliest works, which comes in most concentrated form here. Sure, it's a novel made up almost entirely of the cynical listlessness of all Generation X cliches that followed, but that's the entirely appropriate result of this being the book that defined the cliches. The book, in fact, which coined the term. And there's a little more going on here than just capturing an era: I recall interesting resonances in the strange fables the characters told eachother each evening, which punctuate the story, especially.

This started very promising, but soon became bogged down in hollow, absurd stories. Chronologically I belong to this Generation X, and it is true that at one time (mid '80s) my generation seemed "lost", due to the economic crisis, postmodernism and especially the post-1968 syndrome. But apparently eventually all (?) worked out. Moreover, we in the West are now facing very different problems: how to stay afloat in a globalized world, the growing social inequalities, the integration of minorities, global warming, the emptiness after the death of God .... With all that, this book by Coupland seems no more than a shortfallen luminous star, that later proved to be a false hit.

Generation X is a novel set in the 1990s, and is a story centred around three friends, Andy Palmer, Dagmar (Dag) Bellinghausen and Claire Baxter. Three additional characters make an appearance as the story progresses, including Tobias, Elvissa, and Tyler. The principal narrator throughout is Andy.

We follow the characters as they hang out together, talking about their lives and sharing stories. In terms of plot, not much happens other than a few relatively insignificant events. There is a love triangle, and one of the characters has an unexpected penchant for vandalism, both of which are resolved at the end of novel.

Generation X is more a vignette of the 1990s, and it reads like flipping through an album of nostalgic Polaroids that capture that zeitgeist. There is a reference to this early on in the book where Andy watches his friends and is “helplessly reminded of the sort of bleached Kodak snapshots taken decades ago and found in shoe boxes in attics everywhere.”

If you are looking for an action-packed, plot-driven novel set in the 1990s, you might be disappointed with Generation X. However, if you like character-driven fiction, and are of a certain age, perhaps looking to chill with a group of people who loosely remind you of your own nineties friendship group, you may love it. I certainly did.

Definitely not my kind of literature

Coupland is often unjustly derided as an author who was beholden to one cultural moment, one which has passed. That's distinctly uncharitable, particularly given how much of this book seems timeless. So many of his observations about Generation X apply equally well to Millennial. I'm a skeptic of generation narratives in general, and it seems to me that many of these social artifacts we identify are about age, not generation. Not much happens in this book, famously, with the most plot-ty plot point, a car lit on fire, amounting to a footnote in the text. Instead there's a preoccupation with interaction, an eye for the peculiar social norms and language of the young and directionless. You do have to have a tolerance for a particular form of 90s blank sarcasm, but if you have experienced the internet you already know whether you like that or not. And it is all set against the desert, the book's central image and metaphor, which literalizes the character's omnipresent sense of living on the edge of the world.

Overall I liked the book, but I didn't develop any fondness for the primary charcters. As for these carbon-based complainers, I thought they were pretensious, cynical, and were drowinig in early anomie. Gen X is over flowing with Irony which makes it both enjoyable and gives the impression that the author is trying to hard too write something Hip or Cool.

The early 20's to mid 30's Are the target population. The 3 main characters are directionless and are trying to escape evolving technology and Gotham like cities. They seem eco-friendly bur are not understanding the politics.

This book overflows with blatant examples of obtuse situations. The people and circumstances that ebb and flow into the lives of Andy, Dag, and Claire are very contrived and absurd; In fact, Andy, Dag,and Claire are inauthentic and are "posers" in a declining world with hidden optimism It's another tale of the "Lost" looking for meaning or wanting the sum of their life instances will eventualy yield a novel as profound as "Sex in the City".

I do confess that the author is very talented in observing small group dynamics of people in a post-modern consumer sociey. If you are as old as I am, give it a read.

Lastly, I am currently at the hospital being pumped with chemo and my spelling, grammar, and sentence structures may be currently compromised. FL 4:24

gen x

I remember liking this more when it first came out. Now, my opinion of Gen X has shifted. This book nails the reaction to yuppy culture, the wanderlust, and the independence. But it misses out entirely on the most defining trait of all: TOUGHNESS. As children, Generation X endured abusive fathers and distant mothers. They became the original latchkey kids, and when they saw an opportunity, they escaped. They took risks. They experimented with drugs and alcohol and sex. They tried to change the world. Gen X didn't fear nuclear war (as this book claims), because they didn't fear anything. This was quite possibly their greatest strength and most tragic flaw.

‘She breaks the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.
"Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."’

—-

In all honesty, there were chunks of this book that I’m not sure I understood.

It had a few long, far fetched stories which I struggled to find a takeaway from.

That said, it had enough other interesting content to keep me reading.

Some aspects of the book haven’t aged too well, but others are strangely relatable to the Gen Z despite being a commentary on Gen X. I liked the definitions at the bottom of each page.

Overall, a good read.

this is a weird book - I’m not really sure how to describe it but I liked it and have a the feeling I’d like to reread it again one day. A little bit in the tone of a jaded, but more relatable, version of fear and loathing in Las Vegas.