Review: Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture by Douglas Coupland

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland is that strange kind of book that quickly becomes iconic, epitomising an era in the minds of everyone who reads it, before drifting into relative obscurity as the time it depicts slides away into memory.

And Generation X was iconic. 

It lent its name to the age group it writes about, the oft-overlooked Gen-Xers who were born between 1965 and 1980. The book skewers American culture, politics and commercialism of the time with extreme enthusiasm, and coins terms such as:

• McJob - “A low-pay, low-prestige, low dignity, low benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one”,
• Boomer Envy - “Envy of the material wealth and long-range material security accrued by members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate birth”, and
• Historical overdosing/underdosing - “To live in a period of time when too much/nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines and TV news.”

These coined terms pervade the novel - in fact, when Coupland started out writing the book, he was originally attempting to write a humorous dictionary for his generation, in the mould of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1906) almost a century earlier. They appear regularly in footnotes throughout the book, alongside little slogans and graphics that add colour to the tone of the story. 

Some people might question the relevance of the footnotes to the actual narrative, as they only occasionally appear in the text at the time they crop up, if at all. Others might find them distracting from the actual plot. But for me, they add a real flavour to the novel that grounds it in a wider reality that goes beyond the story’s limited world of West Palm Springs - the reality which the protagonists are trying to escape.

Without those snappy little quotes, with their ironic wit and playful wordplay, I don’t think that the novel would feel nearly as engaging. The footnotes were notably missing from Coupland’s sci-fi spiritual sequel, Generation A (2009), and in my opinion it was a good, but lesser experience for it.

Regarding the plot itself - Generation X is the story of Andy, Claire and Dag, who are three twenty-somethings who quit their jobs and moved out into the desert to avoid the depressing reality of late-80s, early-90s America, and entertain each other with quirky stories. As the book’s Amazon page puts it: they were “brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, [and are] fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market”.

The book’s main narrative is in essence a kind of framing device for Coupland to showcase his quirky, satirical storytelling in short narratives about Japanese business trips, nuclear explosions, and an astronaut landing on an alien planet called Texlahoma that exists eternally in 1974. Comparisons are often made to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron, and with good reason. Like those books, Generation X is about making you feel like you’re actually there, and the novel is written in a very conversational tone that makes this very easy. Except, you know, in language which people without a degree can still easily understand today.

These stories are usually pretty darned enjoyable, and often quite creative despite usually being overt allegories for the concerns of the character telling it. The trouble is that in the later parts, the stories begin to get rarer as more focus is made on the overarching plot. Moreover, the snappiness of many of these stories highlight the somewhat slow, meandering pace of the novel as a whole. 

The characters do go through a kind of existential narrative arc that does transforms them, however in attempting to accurately depict the malaise of the world they live in, Coupland does occasionally push things too far. Despite enjoying the novel, my attention span did slightly start to wane around the ⅔ mark, despite the book itself only being around 200 pages long.

However, it cannot be understated that despite this, Generation X remains a clever, insightful and otherwise engaging book even to this day. 

Despite being an attempt to capture an extremely specific zeitgeist, its depiction of the early-twenties life remains one of the most universal and honest attempts which I have come across. The world of Generation X is one where its young protagonists feel undervalued and underpaid, and are scared of facing a world they see as both unchangeable and moving too fast - a common feeling for young people throughout the ages. 

Although the specifics have changed, and the pop culture references don’t feel nearly as current anymore, anyone going through that stage in life, or who remembers what it was like, can probably relate to what the book is about. Also, its slogans arguably have aged like a fine wine as debates about bad pay, retro clothing, rolling news and the good fortune of earlier generations have only increased as the decades rolled on.

Moreover, Generation X’s themes of ironic humour and existential frustration set the tone of a wave of 90s literature, and would be followed by similar works such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), which also share the same focus on the existential crises of young, clever yet empty-feeling drop-outs, albeit with more heroin and terrorism (heroism?!). 

Generation X might have faded into the background like the age group it named, but only in the sense that a canvas is concealed by paint. Scratch the surface and its importance remains as strong as ever.

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