"Generation X" by Douglas Coupland

Belated teenage angst is to the fore in these three characters: Dag, Andy and Claire, who live in bungalows around a swimming pool in Palm Springs, California, paying the bills by tending bar. They could have been yuppies but they have turned their backs on all that for the sake of authenticity. And their parents don't understand them.


Three twenty somethings have dropped out of “The endless stream of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" (p 14) to tend bar and live in a Californian bungalow with a swimming pool. The problem is that their previous lives were meaningless but there isn't a lot more meaning in this one. They hate their consumerist society but they love the good things that money brings: "I sat there and babbled and ate the food, which, I must say, was truly delicious: a celery root remoulade and John Dory fish in Pernod sauce.”

Perhaps it was intended to be a Decameron: posh people fleeing from the plague of consumerist nihilism tell stories to one another in the desert. But who wants to listen to the whinges of the spoiled?

I felt:

• (a) they were a bit old for teenage angst
• (b) they were fake and false and spoiled! (I sound so old!!!!) 

It is as if life isn't worth living but she is still going to floss.

It was all just a little bit too comfortable. They are not struggling to make ends meet; Andy flies home for Christmas. They work and they party. Perhaps this is a pattern in American tales of troubled youngsters. Holden Caulfield, a genuine teenager in The Catcher in the Rye, might be lonely and depressed and haunted by the sense that everything is false but he goes to private school, stays in a hotel in New York, rides around in cabs, goes to restaurants. Suicidal Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People has a rich lawyer father who gives him a car for his birthday. Perhaps only rich Americans have the time to spare for angst.

There were many moments of beautiful writing (“This is the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines and dimwitted butterflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next door - drops that hang like rubies.”, p 10) and many more moments that really made you think:

• “Most of us only have two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.” (p 29)
• “Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they’re still getting real food. It’s not creation, really, but theft, and no one ever feels good about stealing.” (p 33)
• “After you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of Earth? ... What’s your takeaway?”(p 104)
• “I had a quick Scotch to grab a buzz.” (p 115)
• ”My friends are all either married, boring, and depressed; single, bored , and depressed; or moved out of town to avoid boredom and depression.” (p 166)
• “When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality.” (p 166)
• “The only times I’ll ever get” (p 175)
• “We’re all lapdogs; I just happen to know who’s petting me.” (p 185)
• “But hey - if more people like you choose not to play the game, it’s easier for people like me to win.” (p 185)

It made me long for the days when Americans really dropped out, like the works of the immortal Jack Kerouac (On the Road etc)

But the best thing about it was at the bottom of every page there was either a bumper-sticker style slogan or a definition of a Generation X word such as “Hyperkarma: A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime.”

Many thanks to Danny and Mary who bought me this book as a gift.

Other great books by Coupland:

• Shampoo Planet
• Eleanor Rigby

March 2018; 208 pages

This review was written by the
author of Motherdarling