Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture

by Coupland, Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780312054366
• ISBN10: 031205436X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-03-15
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Summary

Generation X is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s--a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop 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 modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture. A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges--landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

Author Biography

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-S÷llingen, 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, the Hokkaido College of Art and Design, Instituto Europeo di Design, and the Japan/America Institute of Management Science.

Table of Contents

The Sun is Your Enemy	3	(6)
Our Parents Had More	9	(4)
Quit Recycling the Past	13	(4)
I Am Not a Target Market	17	(6)
Quit Your Job	23	(6)
Dead at 30 Buried at 70	29	(4)
It Can't Last	33	(6)
Shopping is Not Creating	39	(8)
Re Con Struct	47	(6)
Enter Hyperspace	53	(8)
December 31, 1999	61	(6)
New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too	67	(6)
Monsters Exist	73	(6)
Don't Eat Yourself	79	(4)
Eat Your Parents	83	(4)
Purchased Experiences Don't Count	87	(6)
Remember Earth Clearly	93	(4)
Change Color	97	(8)
Why Am I Poor?	105	(14)
Celebrities Die	109	(10)
I Am Not Jealous	119	(4)
Leave Your Body	123	(6)
Grow Flowers	129	(4)
Define Normal	133	(8)
MTV Not Bullets	141	(4)
Trans Form	145	(4)
Welcome Home From Vietnam, Son	149	(4)
Adventure Without Risk is Disneyland	153	(8)
Plastics Never Disintegrate	161	(8)
Await Lightning	169	(6)
Jan. 01, 2000	175