Rating: 
Summary: The manual on just missing the Baby Boom
Review: Very entertaining -- the novel tries (sometimes succeeds) to be deep and meaningful. It's the story of Dag, Claire, and Andy (narrated by Andy) and their lives together living outside of Palm Springs (get it? they're "outside" of the beautiful area...). Members of the 20-something generation, too young to be Baby Boomers. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is its HyperText layout; with lots of artbits and definitions littering the very wide margins (textbook-wide margins). The novel is a great read and concepts and catch-phrases of a new generation are fascinating
Rating: 
Summary: Billy Idol should sue for copyright infringement
Review: I bought this book anticipating the definitive definition of my nameless generation. I began reading this book hoping for the type of experience that defined who we were and what we believed in. I was at least looking for a humorous look at growing up under the shadow of the baby-boomers.
I still haven't found it. At least not in this book.
I have read many books and this is doubtlessly the worst one that I have ever opened in my life. It is less of a story and more of a Pepsi or a Strydex commercial. The plot seems is as simplistic as an MTV video. The main characters are the most shallow and clueless people that I have ever been fortunate to have never encountered. Although the characters are the same age as me, I felt that the only way that I could identify with them would be to take a time-machine back to when I was 15 years old. All I wanted was for them to grow up and stop complaining about how miserable the lives that they created for themselves were. It's like sitting in on a psychologist's couch, without the psychologist.
There is NOTHING exceptional about this book. If my generation is going to be forever branded and stereotyped as being as shallow as the characters and their lives, then woe is my generation. When characters are this unlikable, it usually means the author is trying to satirize life and society. Coupland makes no attempt to do so. I would at least hope to be able to laugh at these people's expense. But Coupland's attemtps at humor fall far too short.
Why would I want to read a book about three people whos lives are failures? Worse, why would I want to read a book about three people who ACCEPT that their lives are failures?? Am I supposed to feel pity on people who are pitiful?
I refuse to accept that my life is hopeless and that my generation is doomed. And I really hate when this book is hyped as being the defining book of my generation. It is no wonder that this book hasn't been made into a movie yet...there is barely more than five minutes worth of substance in the entire story. Like I said...just enough for an MTV rock video.
This is literature for the short attention spanned. Social commentary with no comment.
Rating: 
Summary: Coupland relates the problems of an entire generation
Review: Douglas Coupland is by far one of the best contemporary authors. Generation X perfectly crystallizes the twenty-something generation for all of us. Coupland recognizes the extreme influence that pop-culture has on his generation, and weaves it into his story as effortlessly as college students discuss it across the globe. He often uses stream of consciousness and blunt, bald conversations between characters to lend an air of realism to his characters. A book that everyone should come into contact with
Rating:
Summary: A modern masterpiece that everyone will identify with.
Review: This novel explodes with the kind of impact seldom found in literature written in the past fifteen years. Anyone reading this book will find a little bit of themselves in it, and some will find that the portrait staring out at them is their own face. Douglas Coupland has translated the desperate boredom of most young Americans into a narrative that is by turns hilarious, ironic, and subtle. A must-read for anyone who's ever felt that there's more to life than the Rat Race of modern commercialized America
Rating:
Summary: Hiariously realistic; this'll be a movie one day....
Review: Though I'm only 16, I can honestly say that this book was incredible. The characters were extremely well developed, and there were lines in this book that are classics...Although the entire time I was reading it, I kept visioning it being produced into a film, it's really not meant for the screen since it's narrated so well, all the lil thoughts and definitons at the bottom of the pages would be lost if this was put on screen. Still, this is a book that simply brings a smile to your face after you've finish reading it, and you get that feeling of complete happiness, like the one you get after seeing a wonderful flick, you can't move or talk or anything, all you can do is sit there and be devoured by joy, and wish that the story had gone on.....
Warning:This book may cause extreme cases of cynicism;
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, memorable, and affecting.
Review: I read this book as a senior in high school, yearning to leave the house, parents, school, and just about everything else. I can't remember too much from the book except the vivid characters
and the incredible ending. The power of literature was near its
fullest when I finished Generation X... it truly affected me.
Rating:
Summary: It spoke to me
Review: An excellent read for anyone who's wanted to drop everything and run.
Three friends give up their high-speed corporate yuppy lives to live in a small
desert town, entertaining each other with stories, dreams, and criticisms of society
at large and baby boomers in particular. Loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Generation X: A+
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: I missed the memo about Douglass Coupland and David Eggers being in some kind of a professional wrestling match over who's a better writer, so you'll have to forgive me for not making references to it. Many of the other reviews seem to have lots of information on said competition, so check those if you're interested.
All comparisons to other (similar?) authors aside, this is a great book, and I don't feel the same "pretension" coming from it as some other reviewers do. I feel that the insinuation that Coupland had somehow planned, while writing this book, to actually name this generation and ride the ensuing media wave borderline insane. Nobody could plan that.
This novel is full of interesting little stories, some better than others, told by three young adults trying to escape the usual routine most of their contemporaries live in by dwelling in modest homes in the California Desert. It's easy to relate, if you've grown up in similar conditions, to their frustration with the materialism, shallowness, and information-saturatedness of the modern world, and their desire to break free of it -- and ESPECIALLY their inability to figure out how to satisfy that desire.
Sure, there's not much in the way of a plot, but the characters and ideas more than compensate for that deficiency. I couldn't really see these characters doing anything particularly plot-driven, like hunting down a buried treasure, anyway.
I was also amused by the definitions of terms sprinkled throughout the pages of the book (Metaphasia: An inability to percieve metaphor).
All-in-all, a good read, if not life-changing. If you go in without expecting some massive revelation based on the author having coined the term Generation X, you can expect to be satisfied.
Rating:
Summary: Don't lose hope, read Dave Eggers & Co instead...
Review: Despite my membership (just barely) in so-called Gen X, I can say that I had absolutely no identification with the sad stories or characters in this miserable book. This interpretation of Gen X as a bunch of apathetic, insipid, ironic kids (which really saddened me because, for a moment, I feared it was true) was jumped on by the popular press who were looking for an easy story to write. The fact is that members of my generation do actually have great passion about their lives, their friends and lovers, art, music and even (get this, Newsweek journalists) their country. And that's why Dave Eggers & his wonderful cadre of writers (like Stephen Elliot, Julie Orringer, Michael Chabon, Ryan Hardy) gave me hope and sustenance...they wrote works of fiction--far richer than, and superior to this "novel"--about lives of passion, love, art, music, pain, and humanity--experiences that Coupland's characters are too numb, or perhaps just too one-dimensional and uninteresting to understand or experience. And they've been rewarded well for it...Michael Chabon with the Pulitzer, Julie Orringer with the Stegner Fellowship, and Dave Eggers with critical acclaim. Don't bother with Coupland and this grim and uninteresting view of an uninteresting "generation". Read the real stuff instead.
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