The true stories they relate are no less strange: Dag tells a particularly haunting tale about a Japanese businessman whose most prized possession, tragically, is a photo of Marilyn Monroe flashing. They fantasize about nuclear Armageddon and the mythical but drab Texlahoma, located on an asteroid, where it is forever 1974. The plot frames a loose Decameron -style collection of "bedtime stories" told by three friends, Dag, Andy and Claire, who have fled society for the relative tranquility of Palm Springs. )." These are just two of the many terse, bitterly on-target observations and cartoons that season the margins of the text. Newcomer Coupland sheds light on an often overlooked segment of the population: "Generation X," the post-baby boomers who must endure "legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)" and who indulge in "knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops 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 their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.Ī dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges―peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.Īndy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s―a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings.Īndy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life.
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