In 2019, the divorce rate hit a record low, as did the marriage rate and the childbirth rate. Unlike in much Gen X fiction (including McInerney’s Story of My Life and The Secret History ), our hero’s parents are still married. As one of the marginal comics by Paul Rivoche puts it: “Don’t worry, mother… If the marriage doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.” The atmosphere of divorce, its ever present possibility, shapes these characters’ contingent and uncommitted life-but it doesn’t define their psychological backgrounds.

Divorce defines the cultural landscape of Generation X. A novelist more concerned with our moral life would explain this atmosphere: perhaps through parental divorce, which played such a huge role in the national psyche of the ’80s and ’90s. Their platonic cuddling and aggressively retro aesthetic create an odd, lightly ironized, closety vibe. Generation X is about three friends, Andy, Dagmar (a man), and Claire. Reading Coupland’s debut novel, you’ll be reminded that seminal Gen X lit includes not just Jay McInerney’s moral tales but Donna Tartt’s 1992 divine-madness pulp masterpiece The Secret History. They’re haunted not just by the mushroom cloud but by the monastery. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.” Coupland provides all the expected pleasures: lostness, drifting, downward mobility, a surfeit of irony and anti-politics and over it all the fading shadow of global thermonuclear war, which still haunts the imaginations of this last generation of Cold War kids.īut Coupland’s characters long more for sublimity than for 1950s-style industrial and familial stability. It’s full of incisive nouvelle slang: “McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector.

It is a scrappy, almost zinelike collage of images, marginal text, and patchwork narratives, making it feel like a back issue of a magazine that never quite existed. After all, Coupland, who said that his generation was “sick of stupid labels,” inadvertently coined the self-effacing generational moniker under which my cohort has labored.īut Generation X is something stranger than a novel of social observation. I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique.

Douglas generation x