There's just one thing I like about this book.

See, "pretentious" is a tough word. It's hard to define, and a lot of the time, when you use it to describe something, you actually end up acting pretentious yourself. Therefore, I'm thrilled to find that this book embodies, at least for me, the perfect definition of the word.

Nothing else about the book was any good at all.

Важлива книга, яка б могла бути дуже актуальною для нас зараз (з урахуванням відставання в романтизації кар'єрного успіху та корпоративної культури), але країна гангрена вносить свої корективи в історію розвитку "пострадянської цивілізації, намагаючись забрати в неї префікс.

Щодо змісту, то стало гірше. Ремоут та фріланс замінили телячі стійла, гіг-економіка прийшла на заміну мак-робОтам, а загроза зміни клімату вже майже незворотня. Гірко-солодка вподобайка.

Liked it alot. Though, it's more episodic than having a plot. Interesting it comes out before the theories.

La trascendencia de este libro estriba simplemente en haber popularizado el tan traído y llevado término "Generación X" y el de "McJob", fuera de eso, la novela es totalmente intrascendente.

La trama, prácticamente inexistente, narra la existencia de un grupo de jóvenes adultos durante la época posterior al reaganismo a principios de los noventa. Se podría decir que es un retrato de ciertos estratos de la juventud de esa época, que al contrario de la generación de los baby-boomers ha dejado de creer en el sueño americano: ocupados en pagar sus deudas escolares y atrapados en empleos sin futuro, aburridos de todo y sin creer en nada.

El tema pudiera resultar interesante a pesar de ser una mirada bastante estereotipada de los noventas, pero la realidad es que al menos a mi, Coupland solo consiguió aburrirme, sus personajes son de lo mas plano y la escritura bastante trivial.

I first read this book when I was twenty and it's always stuck with me, it was one of those rare books that just really spoke to me. This is my second reading of the novel in its entirety, though I do read the last chapter every so often as I find the writing so beautiful. Reading it at the age of thirty I'm impressed, and utterly relieved, that it still holds all its initial charm for me, so much so that I've changed my rating from a four-star to a five-star.

A debut novel that's more fascinating for its post-yuppie historical worldview than for its literary reputation. It's a fascinating work, but it offers only a brief glimpse into the stylish greatness that Douglas Coupland was yet to reveal to the world at large. Reading this book will suddenly make you realize that 1990 is now much further in the past than some of us are willing to acknowledge...

this book single-handedly sent me into an existential crisis.

9/10

Dating from 1991, Generation X is an entertaining experiment of a novel by Doug Coupland, the writer who popularized the term Generation X for the disaffected generation born roughly 1961-1981 by William Strauss and Neil Howe's reckoning. The story features three Gen-X friends--Andrew, Dag, and Claire--twenty-somethings who've made the choice to drop out of striving yuppie culture in hopes of finding something more authentic. The three of them are living in Palm Springs, working McJobs, but their real passion is storytelling. As they negotiate the various heartaches of romance, complicated families, and general existential angst, they make a regular practice of telling each other their stories, autobiographical and otherwise, as a way of making sense of life--or maybe just as a way of passing quarter-life crisis time.

I enjoyed this--and did a lot of giggling as I read. Of course, it's got all kinds of nostalgic resonance for a Gen-X reader like me. At different points, it reminded me of Gen-X-defining movies from Slacker (which also came out in 1991), to Office Space, to Reality Bites, and High Fidelity. I have definitely felt--and often still feel--like Andrew, Dag, and Claire. They all felt incredibly real to me, and I found them to be an endearing trio of protagonists. I wouldn't exactly call Generation X great literature, but it definitely had its finger on the pulse of a shift that people felt but didn't yet have words for in 1991. In addition, the regular sidebar cartoons, definitions, and logos are innovative little gems with sort of a meta- quality. The effect they create is like having Tom Servo, Joel, and Crow in the page margins, riffing on all the action.

Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture has little conflict until the end of the book. Thing is, I think the author intended it to be that way.

The novel is told in three parts, revolving around three friends, Dag, Claire, and the narrator, Andy. Other characters slip in and out, but the three are the main focus. What do they do? Nothing. They’re Generation X, not baby boomers. They sit around and tell stories—some about themselves, others made-up on the spot—and so because they’re doing nothing, there is no conflict. As the novel goes on, there’s at least strain to the three-sided friendship as others show up (in part two), but the only real driving conflict doesn’t show up until part three.

This book popularized the term “Generation X,” helped push grunge music into the mainstream, and contains a host of catchy terms (often defined in the margin, making the book quite large and obtuse for a paperback). Example: Andy has a McJob, meaning a low-paying, low-skill, low-prestige job with little room for advancement. With all the unique terminology and the feeling of an anemic generation, no wonder Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club drew comparisons. Still, however entertaining these snippets are and no matter how accurate it is about a group of people, Generation X is still a novel that’s more influential than good. Two stars.

Naah, I dont have the patience for this book. I dont enjoy how it is written, I'm not connecting to the characters or the plot. Im reading and realizing im thinking about something else. Dropping it.

I am in, or at least on the cusp of, Generation X, so I must admit that i expected this curious production to resonate with me more than it did. There were flashes of recognition with some (not nearly all) of the constant string of material culture references. And I recognized, at an intellectual level, how some of the typographical oddities were signalling the malaise of the generation itself: the marginalia draws your attention away from the stories, typical of the fragmented attention of my youth; the ironic, half-clever coinages and definitions (e.g. McJob) reveal that terrible urge to define and understand in an incomprehensible world. But, at my advanced age, I think perhaps those qualities (and the immense resentment of the prior generation, also much in evidence here) are just characteristics of the youth of pretty much any generation you care to name. Or at least any generation where the young people aren't dragged into severe crisis like a World War to turn them away from looking inwards.

That said, the three main characters were alien creatures to me. Part of that was that even the Canadian among them (depressed, undeclared gay, dual-citizen Dag from Toronto, probably D. Coupland's nearest thing to a stand-in) is very heavily Americanized, as is the book, which is primarily set in the dusty California desert (another heavy symbol). The actual narrator, Andy, becomes most human when describing his interactions with his own relatives, but otherwise seems to be entirely lost in his own head. In fact, this book has them all - there is also a woman character who is little more than a cipher - spending more time in alternate worlds than this one, spinning elaborate stories to each other about doomsday scenarios or micro-worlds frozen in time. The stories are moderately amusing but in the end do not illuminate much about either the teller or the people being told to - except that they amuse themselves by spinning tales about appalling alternate realities. Possibly that's the point.

So, I didn't connect. Wrong place and time, maybe. Maybe it's just that (as with Kerouac's On The Road) I have read it at the wrong age. Or maybe it's just too self-consciously clever and hasn't worn well. It was worth the try, I guess.

Amazingly, I had never read this "classic' (or Douglas Coupland) until now. But research on my 1990s story did demand a dive. This really doesn't hold up all that well -- despite some modestly funny moments involving standing for a family portrait and Dag retreating to the Nevada desert. It may be worth reading if you want to track the path from Bret Easton Ellis to Chuck Palahniuk. There's a great deal of dated sneering in this that just feels pointless now. This trio of twentysomethings is relatively aimless and, as much as they may complain about working double-shifts in their McJobs, I'd actually care if they had some loftier goals that they were working towards. They don't. Honestly, I think FIGHT CLUB, REALITY BITES, and Eric Bogosian's underrated SUBURBIA are far better at capturing this milieu than Coupland was. I now realize that various marketing forces seized upon this book to define a generation, although I have to say that Coupland "speaks" for only a small disembodied segment of my generation: in this case, the mish-mash between Toronto and California. Coupland is often so eager to "shock" that he repeats the same stale joke about being a lesbian trapped in a man's body.