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Summary: IMAENCONO...
Review: I belong to the generation after "X", and to the schmuck from Salt Lake City who called my peers a bunch of acultural, emotionally numbed, consumerist neoconservatives, thank you, I enjoyed the laugh. As you inexorably approach middle age and begin to sell out to everyone and everything you used to decry, just as the Boomers (our parents) did before you and the members of my generation will do ourselves one day, I will explain what "Generation X" is really about.Actually, I don't need to. Just read the review entitled "thanks professor fussell" by the enlightened guy from Rochester, and you'll see that "Generation X" is not a call-to-arms for everybody born in the 1960's to unite against the evil Boomer death squads, just as "Shampoo Planet" WASN'T an attempt to label everybody born in the 1970's and 1980's as emotionally numb, consumerist neoconservatives, and that this book is not Douglas Coupland's personal manifesto of his demographical beliefs. Rather, "Generation X" is an awe-inspiring portrait of (North) American culture and life at endgame, and is more profound than any narrow-minded losers from Utah could ever realize. This book is the most imaginative collection of marginalia you can buy today, and serves as a potent wake-up call to anyone who's ever questioned the institutions that dominate their miserable rat-race existences. You have to read it for yourself.
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Summary: It's what we are
Review: A fascinating insight into the malaise that has gripped the youth of America and the rest of the world. A virtuous 'in your face' attack to social norms and what previous generations want of the current one. Read it now.
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Summary: Cool cuts about junk
Review: The emptiness and boredom of 90's (to be more precise: end-half of 80's & 90's) is nicely handled throughout the volume. Insights on details of middle class exploitation thru use of ever cheaper, low (no!) future employees, smile-covered despair and fall of dreams of independency (start-up businesses yielding to mergers) are shockingly sampled. New nerd-words and associated living forms (!), alias dubbed as "X'ers" are sarcastically worked out. Despite these above stuff, I will complain of the discontinuous style this book has been written. Often you may lose the orientation of events and characters. More to say, this may sound weird but I don't know why; hard-rock culture and its sub-cultural influence which ruled a non-negligible amount of X'ers during their adolescence, is way neglected of the content. Anyway, cool debut, a nice dig into 80-90 generation, carried out way insufficiently, but still alive to enjoy.
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Summary: Searching For Unhapiness(e-mail: Rozytots@aol.com)
Review: Douglas Coupland does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of this generation of wanderers, titled Generation X. These kids are searching for some sort of answers to the lives that have happened to them. As well as turning their philosphies into "bed time stories", they try to grab hold of these lives and live every second of them. Determined to not turn into their parents they search for the way of life that best suits them. This book keeps you wondering what the characters are up to even as you close the last page, as though they are out there living and still wandering. Also knowing the desert where this book takes place helps to get a real picture of what and where things are happening.
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Summary: Lyric, poignant poetry in prose
Review: Gorgeous and funny, this book has really got something intangible that can't be captured by the trillions of Time and Newsweek articles about the slacker generation and this, their "Bible." It is a fairy tale type book with a set of post-modern lessons, taught by twentysomething, burned-out friends. It is just right for anyone who's grown up next to a nuclear power plant and freaked out when they test the meltdown sirens, or for anyone who has been stuck in an awful temp gig and fantasized about dropping out to work at a McDonalds and drink gin at noon. There is just something so appealing about the journey of the protagonists that you can read it and feel like you've escaped from life too. Always funny, very ironic, and filled with droll slang ripe for appropriation, this book is a fantastic vacation on paper.
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Summary: This is an extremely good book.
Review: Douglas Coupland is such a great writer. It is ridiculous that one book could be so good.
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Summary: Neither as good nor as bad as you may expect
Review: Coupland has a busload of things he wants to say about Generation X. However, he's far too clever and offbeat to do something so pedestrian as write a documentary on the subject. Instead, he has given life to his ideas by creating people to represent them, then having his people act the way his ideas do. It's not a new idea, but unfortunately, Coupland's ideas may not have enough meat on them to represent believable characters. After all, real people have more to them than just a desire to be minimalistic. We all know that although we may feel exactly this way one day, the time will come when we wake up one morning and are really not as sure of ourselves as we thought we were. And yes, Coupland's characters feel this way too, just like real people. Yet nonetheless, there isn't enough there to be more convincing than a cardboard cutout - or, at most, perhaps a really well-done plastic fast-food mascot. http://glammer.webjump.com
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Summary: thanks professor fussell
Review: I'm a few months older than Mr. Coupland and I was very happy to stumble across a writer of my generation who actually seemed to be describing life in the Information Age in a reflective, funny and accurate way. In the 80s Paul Fussell wrote a book called _Class_ wherein he skewered the aesthetic and attitudinal trappings of the various American classes (and they do exist, sorry). After he finished savaging all the classes Fussell described a group that was self-conscious enough to supercede class boundaries and carve out an original trajectory through life. These he called "the X people". Mr. Coupland has written (Details magazine, a few years ago) that he took the term from Fussell and never intended for Generation X to represent a demographic group, but rather a group of people who were self-conscious, independent thinkers. He furthermore took the opportunity to disown the term because it has been bastardized and redefined as a marketing category. Our three protagonists in the desert didn't seem particularly like "rich kids" to me. They were just people who opted out of the career-trajectory, rat race because it was making them heart-sick and they decided to they didn't give a rat's ass about making lots of money. While this is more common among people who were raised with plenty of money, it is not their exclusive domain. A lot previous reviewers that hated the book referred to it as "pseudo-intellectual". It is not an old-fashioned intellectual book like Donald Barthelme, Don deLillo or John Barth would have written. Rather it is a glib, decadent book that draws indiscriminately from high and low culture to create something more like a flow-chart than a regular novel. One theme that it shares with those older writers (especially deLillo) is the dread of nuclear holocaust that is made explicit several times and to my mind sort of mars the end of the book. Mr. Coupland (and I) must have been the last group of people to do "duck and cover" exercises in school. I've gotten over my nuclear dread. Maybe he has by now too. But without nuclear dread we are left with the empty shallowness of our consumer society. We don't even have anything deep and specific to dread any more. It is this transition that _Generation X_ captures so well, so personally and with such warm, sad humor.
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Summary: This book is TRUE and its a MASTERPIECE.
Review: I read this book about a year after I emigrated to Douglas Coupland's home town (Vancouver, B.C.). The book is a dead ringer for Vancouver : dead-end McJobs, nobody can afford a house, the boomers own everything in that town and the Gen-X'ers have absolutely ZERO opportunity for advancement - they are just waiting for their boomer relatives to die so they can get an inheritance. Taxes have turned all the X'ers in Vancouver into walking zombies. The boomers were slowly selling all the businesses and homes to Hong Kong immigrants, thereby screwing the Canadian children of Vancouver... Many reviewers on this site just DON'T get it (seems like maybe the Young Republicans club is attacking Amazon). The three main characters are a metaphor for an entire generation, and that deserts are meditative places and Palm Springs is not important at all to the storyline !!! It really is TRUE that gen-X'ers have to work their ass off just to tread water, in our age of "Diminished Expectations" (re: Paul Krugman's book). I myself have felt the sting of being in "Generation-X" - as a Ph.D. computer engineer who could not earn enough to ever advance out of "renter status" as a professor at UBC; I refused to believe Coupland and now I am killing myself at my 5th cross-country consulting job in as many years, and I can just barely afford to live next to boomer plumbers and tradesmen who got their house in the 1970's and got it FOR FREE (inflation and X'ers paid for it, oh ye students of economic history). Who can compete with the stinking ("28% income tax bracket") rich boomer boomer middle class !! Nobody !! It is OBSCENE that parents can steal opportunity from their own children, and then call their children "slackers" in order to justify their obese gluttony and greed... This is the boomer generation !!! Go Douglas Coupland !!! Death to Boomers !!!
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Summary: I love this book
Review: This is THE book for the real Generation X--The blank generation wasteland between self absorbed youth obsessed boomers and the acultural "global teens". If you are one of us, you know exactly who I mean. For some reason, the media thinks "Generation X" is still 20 something. We aren't. We are now 30 something, the same age as the people in this book would be if they were real instead of fictional. We are the people who watched the selfish self-righteous baby boomers steal, devalue and trash everything in the United States right before we got there. We are the people who invented ironical adulthood in order to avoid being like those same self absorbed, spiritual materialist, nostalgia junkie, yuppie-scum baby-boomers who destroyed the value of adulthood right smack before we got a chance to be adults ourselves and then rubbed our noses in it. I don't suppose modern <or=to 20 somethings would relate to this at all--Coupland portrays that age group as a bunch of emotionally numbed neo-conservative consumerist "global teens". An accurate portrait, I'd say.
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