Generation X: I just got nostalgic for the apocalypse

Re-reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was like a Russian doll of nostalgia. I read it purely as an escape, first to 2004, when I first read the novel; then to 1991, when the novel was first published and set; then into the post-war decades which are either mocked or glorified (or both) throughout. Reading it, I almost forgot about the 2024 U.S. Election, the dawn of AI, and the grim reality I'll never own a home or retire. By the end of Generation X, I actually had nostalgia for the apocalypse.

Compared to the other highbrow, pretentious bullshit I’ve been reading for the past two decades, Generation X was the novelistic equivalent of a 90s sitcom. And I couldn’t have been more into it.  

The novel is about three friends, Andy (the narrator), Claire and Dag, who ditched their careers and cities to live a platonic existence in Palm Springs in the California desert. To take it at face value, they’re escaping the uninspiring clutches of mass culture, we’ll call it.

Like most generation-defining novels—I’m thinking The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, On the Road, The Catcher and the Rye—you mostly get a kind of approximation of what these 20-somethings are running away from since they seem incapable of facing it and therefore articulating it. Andy, Dag and Claire articulate just about everything else, waxing about Pacific Ocean garbage patch, the styles of bygone decades, semi-disposable Swedish furniture, apocalyptic fantasies, shopping malls, personality-character types, their families, etc.

It's all very 90s white kids sitting around articulately dissecting consumerism and corporate whatever. But I have to say, biking home last week after a tough day at the literal office, being honked at in Toronto traffic, reading this kind of light, anti-capitalist sentiment was like hardcore porn to me. If the porn was delivered phonically in the gently humorous patter of an NPR or This American Life, say. To be sure, if the three main characters were in their 20s today, they’d have podcasts and probably adviser jobs in Obama’s White House.

But hey, man, as long as my terror and frustrations are reflected somewhere (anywhere), I'm happy. In a way.

Generation X: The plot, such as it is…

Andy and Dag are both bartenders at Larry’s Bar and Claire works in retail. Andy is from Oregon, an obvious surrogate for Coupland’s hometown of Vancouver, B.C. Maybe Coupland did that because it was too unhip to be from Canada in the early 90s. Who knows. At least Dag is from Toronto. And Claire is from Los Angeles.

They each end up renting bungalows connected by a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool, where they smoke cigarettes and tell each other stories. It’s a thing; they request stories. That part is a little earnest. Huge chunks of the book are actually made up of those stories, which I liked structurally, because, while it’s tacitly a novel, it also reads slightly like a book of short stories. And better than that, these are not tight, inch-perfect short stories; it’s more casual, oral storytelling that the narrators, and other characters, comment on.

Sometimes you’re in the mood for a book that doesn’t sound written all to hell.

In that way, the book reads a little like a curiosity. The characters have disconnected from culture (in this case, that means MTV and fax machines, seriously) by reverting to the most primitive kind of storytelling, just straight-up talking. Like they’ve gone out into the jungle of mass culture and returned to discuss the dangers (or mind-numbing boredom) of the hunt. I guess in this analogy the campfire is a kidney-shaped pool?

Maybe that thought is a little too Marshall McLuhan. (Or a mis-reading of McLuhan, at the very least.)

One story that stood out to me was Andy talking about how he worked at “this teenybopper magazine office in Japan.” Of course. Andy is the new guy and the only foreigner, so his boss, Mr. Takamichi, invites him up to his swanky office, past Impressionist paintings, where they drink salty green tea among the highbrow Japanese minimalism. In the corner is a tacky safe. Mr. Takamichi eventually opens the safe and shows Andy his “most valuable thing”, a 1950s black-and-white picture of Marylin Monroe getting into a Checker cab and lifting her skirt.

What comes next in the scene is a little long, but I think it’s illustrative of something happening beneath the plastic surface wit of the novel. Andy says,

“I broke out into a cold sweat and the words of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain—his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves may we be allowed to read it before we die. The burning blood in my ears told me that Mr. Takamichi had somehow mistaken the Monroe photo in the safe for the letter inside of himself, and that I, myself, was in peril of making some sort of similar mistake.

Generation X: Now denial, McJobs and Mental Ground Zero

Another key feature of Generation X is that the margins are populated by panels that seem to mimic quick-hit advertising tactics in magazines (I think?). The panels are usually definitions, cartoons, or quotes or headline.

In a dizzying meta-reading kind of way, the novel provides a term for the very reason I picked it up in the first place. 

“Now Denial: To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the

only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.”

Except obviously no one thinks the future is going to be interesting. Unless you’re seriously fucking stupid. Maybe that’s the key difference between 1991 and 2024. For all its cynicism, the 90s still contained this bizarre strain of optimism. Which is funny in a way that’s literally impossible to laugh at.

The novel provides a term for just about everything. This tick of incessantly providing new definitions for existing things may be the characters’ response to the overwhelming culture, i.e., the tidal wave of shit, meaning, how can one tell what actually matters? It can't all matter. Therefore nothing matters, and everything becomes fodder for a joke or a story. Or maybe they’re just bored.

As they wade through the surface-level of their own experiences in their stories, they occasionally hit upon something poignant (as in Andy's Rilke story) or just straight-up funny (below).

Dag bitching about his parents, near the end of one scene:

"Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them."

One of the more famous examples of these paneled definitions describes a McJob:

“A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector.

Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.”

Reading that, I couldn’t help feeling most media jobs in Toronto seem to be morphing into McJobs, since they share at least a couple characteristics.

Other diversions:

“Bench press your I.Q.”

“The Love of Meat Prevents Any Real Change”.

Or this definition:

“Mental Ground Zero: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.”

Or:

“101-ism: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.”

Or one character talking about how plastics will be around “until the sun goes supernova”. There are terms like “Decade Blending” for wearing clothes and accessories from different decades in one outfit. And “shopping is not creating”, and “Expatriate Solipsism”, when you arrive at a foreign destination pissed off after discovering there are a bunch of people just like you there and refusing “to talk to said people because they have ruined one’s elitist travel fantasy.”  

Sometimes you just need to see yourself in the mirror. Doesn’t have to be much deeper than that. I don’t see that much of myself in the art or entertainment (or commercials) being produced in 2024. But that’s on me, I guess. It says so clearly in another panel ad/headline in Generation X:

“You might not count in the new order.”

Get out of my head.

Generation X: It’s not that the 90s ruled, it’s that the 21st century sucks

Re-entering the 90s through a generation-defining novel was even better than I expected it to be. I really didn’t expect it to work. I think it’s more a testament to how gross the current decade is than anything else. The need to escape is that much greater. Even just the job market. The thought of retirement is utterly fucking insane. I’m starting to think the only viable retirement options available to me are wandering into traffic or becoming some despot’s food taster.

I’m bumming myself out. Let me get back on track.

Seldom do I read for nostalgia for a time period that I’ve actually lived through. In fact, I think re-reading Generation X was the first time I’ve ever done that. The novel as an artform is not typically the place one goes to for this. Music and TV are much better suited to deliver heavy doses of nostalgia. I’m thinking Nirvana Unplugged (which apparently Coupland was actually at)

or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the cartoon, which, if I heard the theme music to that, would probably make me burst into tears.

Usually, I re-read a novel to feel nostalgia for the last time I read that novel or for a time period I’ve never lived through.

Maybe it’s the book’s post-apocalyptic setting in the American desert, but there is also the sense of an ending that permeates it. I’m sure it’s because we know what happened in the intervening years.

It's almost like there was an apocalypse in there somewhere, between the years 1991 and 2024, and no one noticed it.