Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture | 
|  | | | Title: | Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture | | Author: | Douglas Coupland | | Publisher: | St. Martin's Griffin | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 15 March, 1991 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 031205436X / 9780312054366 | | List Price: | $15.95 | | You Save: | $5.10 | | Amazon Price: | $10.85 | |
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Product Description
Generation X is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s--a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething."Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges--landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
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Customer Reviews:
• Fellow Slackers 01 December, 2007
This one is a gem for Gen X-ers like myself. It makes me feel like a part of a generation and not some independent under-achiever.
I envy the three main characters being able to spend so much time together. They are from relatively well off families, which I can't relate to, but it does show their decision to avoid the mainstream. The idea of dysfunctional families is also well played.
The ending is great and I've read this book several times.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1DEO5OI53FZ4C
• I Get It, But That Doesn't Mean I Agree 01 July, 2008
"Generation X" is best described as a cross between the philosophy of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" and the pointlessness of Bret Easton Ellis's "Less Than Zero". But, whereas I enjoyed "Less Than Zero" and consider "Fight Club" to be one of my all-time favourite books, I do not feel the same way about "Generation X".
In "Generation X", after rejecting a culture based on money and commercialism, a group of twenty-somethings move to Palm Springs and spend their time telling each other stories of the world they left, while trying to live the life that they want.
Being about the same age as the characters in this book, I could understand a lot of what author Douglas Coupland is trying to say, and probably much better than I would have 5 or 10 years earlier. I get "mid-20's crises". I get the fact that housing is no longer affordable to younger people. However, even though I do understand these things, I think that the way that Coupland's characters go about dealing with these issues is unrealistic. Coupland creates an ideal lifestyle for his characters that I find difficult to believe would actually work in the real world. I don't want to be a wage slave any more than the next person, and I don't feel the need to buy stuff just for the sake of acquiring possessions, but at the same time, I do need to live somewhere, eat, buy clothes etc and acquire enough savings so that I don't have to eat dog food in my old age, and that is a whole lot easier for me to achieve as an office worker than if I were to quit my job and take one of the "McJobs" that Coupland's protagonists all hold. To make matters worse, I found Coupland, through his characters, to be extremely condescending towards people who do not share his beliefs, and worst of all, the book is just plain dull. As I said before, philosophically, "Generation X" and "Fight Club" are very similar, but interesting stuff happens in "Fight Club". It doesn't in "Generation X".
- Reviewed by customer ID: ATZ1LTONGHOP6
• For Post-modern Cultural Anthropologists, Hipster Apologists 02 February, 2008
The book you hate to love? Or love to hate?
It's no wonder Coupland saw literary success after this book. It really is a triumph on all the scales that authors and their critics measure each other. It's devilishly clever, rife with scythe-like word-play, well-paced... It's everything a novel should be.
But at it's kernel, this is a book about some of the most pathetic folks to walk the face of the imagined Earth. A couple of burnt-out hipsters, wallowing in the hole of self-pity that they dug for themselves in the Coachella valley
-- a trio of not-really-losers but mid-to-late-20-somethings that self-righteously reject materialism and yet seem to cringe under the comparative psychic weight of their forced rejection of consumerist standards (the only yardstick they seem to have). And yet they won't take any risks. For lack of what I can only assume is courage, they do not deviate from their course. Sure, you can pick apart the prose for clues to the contrary but the notes in the margins spell it out for you. They're doomed. Even our closing act has the melancholy stench of cautious abandonment hanging over it.
Which is why I could not help but kick myself for enjoying it as much as I did.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1L94WV25FV2QT
• So Accurate 30 July, 2007
Generation X is a cool, loose limbed, flexi sort of a novel. The plot is not really there - it is more a series of character portraits of doomed gen x'ers who opt out of the yuppie sell out rat race, with miserable jobs in cubicles 'veal fattening pens' working for clapped out, sold out hippies. They wind up in the Desert, Palm Springs region, working in dead end 'McJobs' in the service industry and don't do much else except whine, gripe, tell stories and fuss in a sort of Delillo lite pop analysis way. It is a compelling read for the observational nails Coupland hits time and time again in this novel. The numbers he puts up are extraordinary. Nearly every line rings true in some sense, except perhaps the really weird far left field final chapters which dissolve the book in a fairly unsatisfactory ending. Many of these points are in the extra text dictionary definitions that weave through the pages. You'll recognise them, even if you yourself are not a gen-xer. Terms such as 'emotional ketchup burst: the bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends - most of whom thought things were fine; 'Conversational Slumming' - the self conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigour; me-ism - the search for a personal religion, personally tailored.
Coupland has an acute sense of the contemporary head and heart. And his characters are far more rounded than the flat, one dimensional sadists of the likes of Bret Easton Ellis and 'Less than Zero' or 'American Psycho'.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AJ9W09EUQPAKE
• Coupland Writes On Growing Up (these Are My Scattered Thoughts) 08 August, 2008
The first Douglas Coupland book I ever read was Hey Nostradamus, which is such an amazingly compiled story and one of my favorites of Coupland's novels. I just kept looking for his books at random used bookstores across the U.S., so the next book I found was Miss Wyoming, not great but worth the read. Then Shampoo Planet. Next I found Eleanor Rigby and really enjoyed it. Then I finally went to Amazon to purchase Life After God and the last book of his I've read is none other than Generation X.
I think Coupland says a lot about this generation "raised without religion" in Life After God and I really couldn't agree more with his ponderings and realizations about living and growing up and being in that awkward stage of immaturity in your 20s. It's true, we need God. He's our source of strength and hope. I've lived without God and I've lived with God, and I definitely see how our souls long for relationship WITH God.
The format of Generation X is really neat, Coupland definitely thinks outside the box of other authors and really creates something for his readers to look over, read, and then think about and talk about long after they finish the book. Amazing first novel. I think my generation of twentysomethings that was born in the 80s still struggles with some of the same issues Andy, Dag and Claire struggle with in the book. It's interesting to see how they handle it and their hunger for life and the dissatisfaction they experience with love and jobs and everything else. Definitely worth the read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3A1IQGOLJA1UA
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