Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Douglas Coupland

Macmillan, 1991 - Fiction - 183 pages

Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born from 1960 to 1978 —a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings.

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops 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 their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.
A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges—peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.

Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - ragwaine - LibraryThing

Nothing really happens in this novel, but maybe that's a metaphor for GenXers lives or at least the way they see their lives? I'm firmly in the middle of Gen X, being born in 1970, maybe this book ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rimbo90 - LibraryThing

This is definitely a quirky little number but I would not say it is the masterpiece it is made out to be in some quarters. It certainly has had it's influence though. Definitely worth a read.

Contents

• The Sun is Your Enemy: 3
• Am Not a Target Market: 17
• It Cant Last: 33
• Re Con Struct: 47
• December 31 1999: 61
• Dont Eat Yourself: 79
• Remember Earth Clearly: 93
• Change Color: 97
• Am Not Jealous: 119
• Define Normal: 133
• Welcome Home From Vietnam Son: 149
• Await Lightning: 169

About the author

Douglas Coupland was born on the 4-Wing Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany in 1961. He is the author of Miss Wyoming, Generation X, All Families are Psychotic, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others. He attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. www.coupland.com.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
• Author: Douglas Coupland
• Edition: reprint, revised, braille
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1991
• ISBN: 031205436X, 9780312054366
• Length: 183 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Fiction / World Literature / Canada / 20th Century