The novel opens with a description of the first characters: Dag, Harry and Lucy, three post-boomers in their late twenties living in a satellite town of Palm Springs, California. In this groundbreaking and wide-reaching cultural novel, Coupland creates a complex portrait of Gen X and includes stories and musings that explore the idea of a generation created in the age of media, technology and rapid change. Coupland’s work focused on the post-baby boom generation, giving voice to their unique cultural, economic and social experiences. It also happens to be one of the oldest, and indeed greatest, themes in American literature.When Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, by Douglas Coupland, was first published in the early 1990s, it launched the term “Generation X” into the cultural lexicon. Their radical take on downshifting can be seen as a quest for the inscription of absence that points to a prelapsarian Neverland called America. In a bid to become latter-day Scheherazades, they “uit everything”, relocate to the Californian desert where they take on McJobs (another neologism popularised by this book) and transform their lives into “worthwhile tales” through storytelling. Andy, Claire and Dag all experience mid-twenties crises when they realise their existence has become “a series of scary incidents that simply stringing together to make for an interesting book”. The result - a kind of Arabian Nights for slackers - accounts for the book’s instant-classic status and enduring impact. St Martin’s Press had envisaged an updated version of the Yuppie Handbook, but Coupland penned a bittersweet novel about the search for meaning in a world devoid of grand narratives.

Thereafter, the expression became ubiquitous - supplanting “twentysomething” - and the Canadian author was hailed as the poet laureate of grunge (a phenomenon which also went mainstream in 91).

Paradoxically, Generation X gave visibility to a nameless ‘X generation’ of post-baby boomers which, according to Coupland, was “purposefully hiding” - not so much a lost generation, then, as one bent on losing itself. Billy Idol’s group was later namechecked by Douglas Coupland in one of his zeitgeist-defining articles (1987-89) that developed into a comic strip and, eventually, a book, published in 1991 (the same year as indie film Slackers and another Gen-X classic, American Psycho). Impact: The book that defined a generationĪlthough its first recorded occurrence dates back to the early 1950s, “Generation X” gained currency as the name of an English punk band (1976) lifted from the title of an early study on youth culture (1964). Title: Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture Here is my entry on Douglas Coupland‘s Generation X (p. In 2007, I wrote four entries for The Little Black Book of Books ( Cassell Illustrated) edited by Lucy Daniel.

Generation X by Douglas Coupland