The content of some of the reviews was more troubling. That and the idea that this book, and the author, was somehow supposed to be speaking for Generation X - a group I fall in the middle of. This was not the apparent goal of Douglas Coupland, but a role that seems to have been handed to him. The author was born in 1961, putting him outside of the window of Generation X, or on the raggedy edge between Boomers and Gen-Xers depending on the definition one wants to use. It is troubling that Mr. Coupland has become "the voice of a generation" he didn't belong to - this is supposed to be a novel, not a documentary.
Perhaps more than anything, I've waited too long to read this, as I may have had different eyes at the age of 22 than I do in 2015. I wonder if the same situation could be encountered by someone who was a teen in the 1950's, but waited until the late 1970's to read On the Road by Jack Kerouac?
The book is also set in Los Angeles, which is a world away from anything approaching real life. This is a little unfortunate, since the author is Canadian and hadn't lived in LA very long before writing it. I actually think the book would have been more interesting if it was set in Toronto. There is subplot for the book in New York and the last thing the world needs are more books set in LA and NY. At least a minor portion of the book takes place elsewhere.
While the LA experience probably does not approximate that of most Gen-Xers, I was in Palm Springs for several weeks of the summer before the book was published in 1991. I was only supposed to go to California and drive a car back, but one thing led to another, as can happen if one is lucky enough as a late teen. This doesn't bring me closer to the stories of the book, but it actually did help with context. What I remember most about those weeks, was the absolute dichotomy of the area. I was staying in a large house in the shadow of Bob Hope's Palm Springs house, while also spending time in a small, poorer, working town called Banning. This dichotomy is touched on in the book, especially in relation to consumerism and its rejection that the main characters espouse.
Going through some old pictures recently, I've been struggling to envision what my world would possibly have looked like 10 or 15 years ago - or now - if some seemingly minor choices had gone differently in the early 1990's. Unquestionably, things could be vastly different due to some decisions at the time which seemed minor and almost arbitrary. But history can only be rewritten once there is a victor.
The book revolves around three main characters, Andy (narrator), Dag and Claire. A synopsis can be found elsewhere so I won't rehash it here, but the important thing to note is that there really isn't a plot to the book. This in and of itself is not a good or bad characteristic for a book. A plot can help push a book along. Generation X is a very quick read and the book is more about character development than anything else; generic characters to represent a generation. The lack of a plot does make sense in the context of a book set in the 1980's - there is no plot or narrative that can be distilled from the decade that birthed sport motorcycles, Miami Vice was on TV, Reagan was president, The Breakfast Club was filmed, and big hair bands ruled.
In 2015, the book reads like a conversation with an old acquaintance, possibly a conversation where two people have grown in totally different directions in the ensuing decades. There are awkward pauses and the discussion is somewhat forced. The stilted nature of the book isn't totally off putting at times since it allows thoughts to go back to a time of Sony Walkmans, family portraits with awful plastic backgrounds, large shopping malls, and Yuppies. Do families still take formal portraits anymore? Is there a 2015 synonym for Yuppies? The book is completely devoid of cell phones and the internet, let alone Facebook, making the lack of a plot that much more enjoyable.
I wish I had read this book shortly after the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Ready Player One isn't a terribly memorable book, but in some ways speaks to and about Generation X in a totally different way than Douglas Coupland's book. When video games were huge wooden boxes that required quarters, who didn't want all that wasted money and skill to go to saving the earth?
Spoiler Alert!
The book ends with an odd bit about a "cocaine white egret" and a burned farm field with some mentally retarded children. It is too bad that Mr. Coupland didn't start with this descriptive bird as it may have made him eligible for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Despite reading and rereading the ending a few times, it feels like a complete non-sequitur. I have yet to see any explanation of the ending that I think actually makes sense with the rest of the book. So if the 1980's didn't have a plot, as the book does not, maybe a nonsense ending out of nowhere is appropriate? I ... found it lacking.
End Spoiler Alert!
Beyond the end of the text of the book are a series of statistics without context. They seem to want to imply that Gen-X is screwed compared to the Boomers and the Silent Generation. But few people I know actually lived these statistics, and then it was most often by choice. Again, LA is not real life. Looking at the statistics now, they look frightfully similar to what could be compiled about Millennials right now.
And maybe that is the point - the book rails against consumerism throughout the pages, just as Millennials now attempt to do, stating emphatically that, "Advertising doesn't work on me." Yet ... once Generation X figured out how to sell to Generation X and Millennials are figuring out how to easily sell to Millennials, "consumerism" really isn't going anywhere. This is despite every generation since World War II vilifying their parents and arguing consumerism's last gasping breath. Even the subtitle can be transported between generations, Tales for and Accelerated Culture - "Everything happens so much faster now!" opines the Millennial.
Perhaps what really needs to be understood and taken from the book is that while we can recognize collective deviance in others, deviance is much harder to see in the generational mirror.
"You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can 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." - Douglas Coupland
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