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Andy Warhol once said “I am a deeply superficial person.” and I believe this quote truly resume Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.
Dag, Claire and Andy – the narrator – are neighbors living in Palm Springs, but mostly they embody the search to find a balance between the stereotypical and consumerist American Way of Life and their own cultural values. They dissect their world and actions with cynicism, trying to fit into society.
Don’t except any intrigue or nebulous plot, this book doesn’t need that kind of trick to reach the core of its characters. They are simply outlined in their daily lives, throughout minor events that echoed to a deeper meaning.
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was primarily supposed to be a sociologic study on people born during the sixties, but in my opinion, it grows far beyond that. Fascinated with retro and scared of their mapped out future they symbolize the damage of every middle-class generation since the decay of the baby-boomer one. They dissect their world and actions with cynicism, trying to fit into society without really wanting it.
But this exposition of modern life is also completed with Douglas Coupland’s neologisms and slogans featured on the margin, giving to this book not only a new dimension by allowing it to spread in the reader’s vocabulary, but also by giving it higher chances of being browsed occasionally.
Coupland’s style is mainly based on a severe inclination for intertextuality and detailed references to pop and alternative cultures, creating a rather exhaustive portrait of his characters’ universe. Despise that, Coupland’s writing is fairly simple, living more space to content.
Throughout the entire book, the characters create ‘social anticipation’ stories – which will later became Douglas Coupland’s special field – and as far as I’m concerned, Generation X’s most emblematic passage is one of those tales. Claire tells the story of Buck the astronaut, forced to land in the dull and dystopian universe of Texlahoma, where he gets a bad case of spatial food poisoning and has to rely on his lies to get out.
I guess the main thing an honest reader could blame Coupland for is the fact that this book could be somewhat snob and middle-class focused; but I personally choose to be dishonest on that one and states that this book is a must-read.
