Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Paperback)

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Review
'A new age J.D Sallinger on smart drugs.' TIME OUT 'Dizzying sparkle and originality.' THE TIMES, 'Quirky, witty, with an affection for its characters which lifts it above the level of such as Bret Easton Ellis's 'Less than Zero.' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'A Landmark book.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Fiercely comic.' SUNDAY EXPRESS 'A weird, highly intelligent trashing of the whole yuppy culture.' GAY TIMES

Hamstrung by its reputation as the anthem of a generation, this is a clever, witty depiction of the alienation felt by the over-educated and under-employed, those forced into 'McJobs'. Andy, Dag and Claire have opted out of the lifestyle their schooling has prepared them for and into a life in the California desert, preserving themselves by barriers of irony and heavy drinking. The only time they let their guard down is via the stories they tell each other. Original, touching and funny. (Kirkus UK)

Despite its gimmicky large-format design, with its conspicuously clever marginalia, this fictional debut could easily teach Bret Easton Ellis a thing or two. Written from the same generational perspective, Coupland's self-conscious search for "the spirit of the times" values genuine wit and the redemptive power of storytelling. The apocalyptic tales of Dagmar Bellinghausen, Claire Baxter, and the narrator, Andy Palmer, all serve as a weird guidebook to their X-ed out generation, a group "purposefully hiding itself" from the hyped-up, consumerist, celebrity-obsessed, popcult saturated mainstream. Their pervasive sense of hell brings them together in Palm Springs, a nuclear-age landscape with "no weather" and "no middle class." Dag, a lapsed Mormon from Canada and a refugee from the ad game, shares bartending duties at Larry's Bar with Andy, a 30-ish student of languages from a big, middle-class family in Portland. Joining them in their desert bungalow retreat is Claire, from a wealthy much-divorced L.A. family. Pool-side, these hip Scheherazades combat boredom with their stories of Texlahoma, the Everyplace in their futuristic fables about intergalactic love, supermarket fallout, and bomb anxiety. There are also wacky little bits about the heiress who meditates into an ethereal death; a man trapped on his library ladder for ten years; and a young fellow who wants to be hit by lightning. In the foreground are this platonic trio's current problems - Dag's pursuit of "a clean slate with no one to read it"; Claire's effort to shake her obsession with a corporate boy-toy; and Andy's own entropic search for "less in life." In the margins, Coupland provides a glossary of mostly funny terms (e.g., "McJob," "historical underdosing," "Bradyism," "teleparablizing," and "brazilification"); a bunch of occasionally humorous slogans ("Nostalgia is a Weapon," "Bench Press Your I.Q."); and a handful of pointless, comic-strip frame illustrations. Even though the social commentary is often glib and misdirected, there's lots of welcome rage seething through the cracks in these fractured fictions. (Kirkus Reviews)

Product Description
Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation- Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working in no future Mc Jobs in the service industry. Underemployed, overeducated and intensely private and unpredicatable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories: disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, 'Elvis moments' and semi-disposible Swedish furniture.

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First Sentence
Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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40 Reviews 5 star:  (19) 4 star:  (13) 3 star:  (4) 2 star:  (3) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review 4.2 out of 5 stars (40 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   16 of 17 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Gets me every time, 24 Nov 2002 By  Phil Gyford (London, UK) - See all my reviews I can't remember how many times I've read Generation X now. Not an obsessive amount, but every so often I need to re-read it as a kind of "touching base." On Saturday, as I packed to spend the weekend at my parents' house, where I grew up, I felt the need for something familiar, easy to read and touching, that would leave me comforted yet introspective. But this is just my relationship with the book. The main narrative concerns three late-twenty-somethings living in a southern California resort town, somewhere anonymous in the desert. All are working in no-responsibility jobs, none have any idea what to do with their lives. Having grown up with the Cold War they're always expecting an apocalyptic end to their world of sun-baked desert and faceless industrial shopping malls. Their conversations and rented bungalows are scattered with references to previous post-war decades in which everything seemed more certain and whose pop-culture seems like an escape from that of today. As the years pass since the book's publication it's becoming apparent that the world in which its set is just another past decade whose sayings and culture are ripe for ironic vultures. But every time I read it I find something that's relevant to my world (if "Legislated Nostalgia: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess" doesn't hit I Love the 19x0s where it hurts, I don't know what does). If you can, forget the whole Gen X thing that floated around back in the nineties, which is far too much baggage for this little story to carry. Well, "stories" would be more appropriate. There's little plot here, but the characters spend much of their time telling each other romantic and doom-filled (and impossibly eloquent) tales; thankfully this is Coupland's forte. This could all sound a bit earnest and it is in places, but I can forgive the characters their occasional self-importance because their stories and lives never fail to get me where it counts, in my easily-touched heart. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   8 of 8 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable - completely amazing, 1 Jul 2002 By  "alexdb" - See all my reviews Don't even bother to read my humble review...go and buy this book RIGHT NOW! By far Coupland's finest novel. If you are already a fan, I assume you've already read Generation X as it is essentially the foundation for all that is Coupland. If you haven't read any of his books, this is certainly the way to start, if you want the full impact of Coupland's unique style of expression and imagery. If, however, you'd prefer a more subdued introduction, go for All Families Are Psychotic or Shampoo Planet, but at some point everyone must read Generation X! The images and stories Coupland incorporates into this novel are a combination of beauty, sadness, loneliness, humour and pure imagination. Unbelievable, that's all I can say - read it. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   12 of 13 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars Generation A, 30 Mar 2007 By  E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    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. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 40 customer reviews...		Most Recent Customer Reviews 5.0 out of 5 stars Read it without your cynical hat on and you'll get a lot out of it. When I first heard the synopsis of Generation X i thought it could go one of two ways; it would be a thought provoking read or it would be self indulgent pretensious tripe. Read more Published 20 hours ago by Mr. Lewis J. Brooks 2.0 out of 5 stars Smug and overly pleased with itself Okay, let's be clear. I'm the exact demographic for this novel. And I recognised pretty much all the references it makes. And I like witty cynicism. Read more Published 4 months ago by bloodsimple 5.0 out of 5 stars use of English I read City of Glass years ago, but my son re-introduced me to Coupland through this book - this guy has an extraordinary ability to conjure up images/impressions with the minimum... Read more Published 8 months ago by cristofa 1.0 out of 5 stars cynical and soulless just like the yuppies it describes Too much self indulgence, too much cynicism, too much... I don't know. Too clever for it's own good. It just did nothing for me at a gut level. Read more Published 9 months ago by Zain Shah 3.0 out of 5 stars Uneventful, But Interseting This is a book I did not particularly enjoy, and I must admit to at times being completely bored rigid, yet some parts were rather interesting. Read more Published 23 months ago by Archy 4.0 out of 5 stars "Adventure Without Risk is Disneyland" I was mildly disappointed when I read this for the first time recently as I was expecting something a little more fast-paced, a little edgier. Read more Published 23 months ago by M. J. Pucci 4.0 out of 5 stars Wry and sad - a masterpiece for the nineties. Coupland is a master of these kind of fin de siecle novels. Generation X is not plot or character driven - it is really just a collection of rambling thoughts on what it means to... Read more Published on 24 April 2007 by Bethany Williams 5.0 out of 5 stars Wow Generation X has become something of an 'our song' between myself and my friends. Deeply moving and subtly bitter, without ever being in any way 'normal', it... Read more Published on 6 Jan 2006 by ladywhisp 4.0 out of 5 stars 90s postmodernism I enjoyed this book, it is a light read, and all the more compelling because essentially nothing happens. Read more Published on 1 Jun 2005 5.0 out of 5 stars If at first... I have read all of Douglas Coupland's fiction and think he is an immensely thought-provoking and inspiring author. Read more Published on 24 April 2005 by lisa-zc Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews › See all 40 customer reviews...

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