Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
GenerationX.jpg
Author Douglas Coupland
Country Canada
Language English
Genre Postmodern literature, Novel
PublisherSt. Martin's Press
Publication date
March 15, 1991
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages192
ISBN 0-312-05436-X (paperback)
OCLC 22510632
813/.54 20
LC Class PS3553.O855 G46 1991
Followed by Shampoo Planet  

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is the first novel by Douglas Coupland, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991. [1] The novel, which popularized the term Generation X , is a framed narrative in which a group of youths exchange heartfelt stories about themselves and fantastical stories of their creation.

Contents

Coupland released the similarly titled Generation A in September 2009. [2]

Synopsis

Generation X is a framed narrative, like Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron by Boccaccio. The framing story is that of three friends—Dag, Claire, and the narrator, Andy—living together in the Coachella Valley in southern California. The tales are told by the various characters in the novel, which is arranged into three parts. Each chapter is separately titled rather than numbered, with titles such as "I Am Not a Target Market" and "Adventure Without Risk Is Disneyland".

The novel was set circa 1990, in the then-rapidly growing and economic booming-turned-into-depressed communities of Palm Springs and the Inland Empire region. Some characters were born and raised in Los Angeles and suburban Orange County.

Part One

The first part of the novel takes place over the course of a picnic. Andrew, Dag, and Claire tell each other stories—some personal, others imagined—over the course of the day. Through these tales, the reader glimpses the characters' motivations and personalities.

Part Two

The initial group of characters is expanded in this section, which introduces stories from additional characters: Claire's boyfriend Tobias, Claire's friend and Dag's love interest Elvissa, Andy's brother Tyler, and Andy's boss and neighbour and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. MacArthur. Each character represents a cultural type; Elvissa is constantly stuck in the past, Tobias is a "yuppie", Tyler is a "global teen", and the neighbours represent members of an older generation.

The frame is muted here, as the narrative draws back to reveal more of the main characters, while allowing for other characters' stories to be heard.

Part Three

In this section, the novel continues to pull back its focus, as Andy and Claire travel away from California. Again, the frame is enlarged to include additional characters. Claire travels to New York, while Andy takes a dreaded trip to visit his family in Portland. Through the characters' personal and mental journeys, more tales are told and more of the characters' personal stories are revealed.

Characters

Andrew "Andy" Palmer

The book's narrator and main character. Andy is a bartender (a "McJob", as he describes it). He is close friends with Dag and Claire. He is from Portland, Oregon.

Dagmar "Dag" Bellinghausen

A former office worker, he now works with Andy at the bar, and lives next door to him. He is obsessed with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, and is prone to occasional erratic behavior. Unlike the other characters (who are American), he is a Canadian, from Toronto.

Claire Baxter

A friend of Andy and Dag that lives in a neighboring bungalow. She is from a large family connected by multiple divorces. She wants to live life as Andy and Dag are trying to, but struggles, partially because of her relationship with Tobias. She is from Los Angeles, California.

Tobias

Claire's boyfriend, a superficial yuppie. He finds the lifestyle of Andy, Dag, and Claire to be interesting, but is unable to commit to it. Neither Andy nor Dag likes him, and he is a foil to the other characters in the novel. Yuppies in the novel were thought to represent Orange County (where they grew up), the Inland Empire (where they live) and L.A. (where they commuted to work).

Elvissa

Claire's best friend, and Dag's love interest. She finds herself constantly trapped in the past, never quite catching up to the modern world. The character represented the poverty and desolation of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts of California, particularly Palm Springs when spring breakers once partied there and where young gay couples moved en masse during the 1980s.

Tyler

Andy's little brother who is five years younger than Andy. As the youngest child in a large family, he is somewhat spoiled, but secretly wishes he could live as Andy does. He is described as a "global teen" and bears great similarity to the main character in Coupland's second novel, Shampoo Planet , that shares his name and mannerisms.

Inspiration

Title

Coupland has presented different narratives concerning the origin of the title Generation X. In one version, the title came from the work of Paul Fussell. [4] In Fussell's 1983 book Class, the term category X designated a part of America's social hierarchy rather than a generation. As Coupland explained in a 1995 interview, "In his final chapter, Fussell named an 'X' category of people who wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence." However, in a 1989 magazine article [5] Coupland attributed the term Generation X to Billy Idol, since it’s the name of the band Idol broke through with.

Novel

Coupland felt that people his age were being misclassified as members of the Baby Boomer generation.

I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things... We're sick of stupid labels, we're sick of being marginalized in lousy jobs, and we're tired of hearing about ourselves from others

Coupland, Boston Globe, 1991 [6]

Later, Coupland described his novel as being about "the fringe of Generation Jones which became the mainstream of Generation X". Generation Jones is a term for tail-end Boomers, born between 1954 and 1964, who felt disconnected from the experiences of older Boomers such as the Vietnam War and the hippie subculture. [7]

Character names

The characters are named after locations in Antarctica. [8]

History

In 1987, Coupland (who was born in 1961) wrote an article for Vancouver Magazine in which he lamented the lack of realization for people within his own birth cohort. A year later, he received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to complete a handbook on the "generation" that he had outlined in the article. [9] Coupland moved to the Mojave desert and the Coachella Valley in California to work on the book, which became a novel. This surprised the publishing company, [9] who canceled the work, which was subsequently accepted by St. Martin's Press and published in March 1991. [10]

The novel was a sleeper bestseller, [11] growing in popularity after a slow start. [9] The terms Generation X and McJob entered the popular vernacular through the book, [12] [13] and Coupland was declared a spokesman for Generation X [14] and lauded for having a feeling for the zeitgeist of the age. [15]

The Generation X fanfare continued through the publication of his second novel, Shampoo Planet , the follow-up about a younger generation; it was also met with fanfare, and Coupland again called a spokesman for a generation.

However, Coupland constantly denied both the idea that there was a Generation X and that he was a spokesman.

This is going to sound heretical coming from me, but I don't think there is a Generation X. What I think a lot of people mistake for this thing that might be Generation X is just the acknowledgment that there exists some other group of people whatever, whoever they might be, younger than, say, Jane Fonda's baby boom.

Coupland, CNN, 1994 [16]

Coupland was offered large sums of money to act as a marketing consultant for the Generation X age group, [17] but he turned them down, notably refusing to create an advertisement for Gap. [18] "Generation X" nonetheless became a marketing force, as the name and ideas were used to market products and services, such as the clothing store Generation Next and the 1995 Citroën car models called "La Generation X" as the XM.

In 1994, before the publication of Microserfs , Coupland declared in Details magazine that Generation X was dead. [19] He stated that the term had been co-opted as a marketing term, and that members of Generation X were relatively resistant to marketing ploys.

The biting, ironic tone of the novel and its pop culture allusions helped bring about a new era of transgressive fiction, including the work of authors Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk. Still in use are the term Generation X and its many derivatives, such as Generation Y and Generation Z . Many critics linked the novel to the popularity of grunge and alternative rock,[ citation needed ] but it makes no reference to grunge, and the song that is widely credited for boosting grunge into mainstream popularity (Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") was released after the novel's publication.

Editions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generation X</span> Cohort born between c. 1965 and 1980

Generation X is the demographic cohort following the Baby Boomers and preceding Millennials. Researchers and popular media often use the mid-1960s as its starting birth years and the late 1970s as its ending birth years, with the generation being generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there are 65.2 million Gen Xers in the United States as of 2019. Most of Generation X are the children of the Silent Generation and early Baby Boomers; Xers are also often the parents of Millennials and Generation Z.

<i>Microserfs</i> Novel by Douglas Coupland

Microserfs, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length. Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuppie</span> Short for "young urban professional"

Yuppie, short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional", is a term coined in the early 1980s for a young professional person working in a city. The term is first attested in 1980, when it was used as a fairly neutral demographic label, but by the mid-to-late 1980s, when a "yuppie backlash" developed due to concerns over issues such as gentrification, some writers began using the term pejoratively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McJob</span> Pejorative work-related slang

"McJob" is a slang term for a low-paying, low-prestige dead-end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of advancement. The term "McJob" comes from the name of the fast-food restaurant McDonald's, but is used to describe any low-status job – regardless of employer – where little training is required, staff turnover is high, and workers' activities are tightly regulated by managers.

Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.

A McWord is a word containing the prefix Mc-, derived from the first syllable of the name of the McDonald's restaurant chain. Words of this nature are either official marketing terms of the chain, or are neologisms designed to evoke pejorative associations with the restaurant chain or fast food in general, often for qualities of cheapness, inauthenticity, or the speed and ease of manufacture. They are also used in non-consumerism contexts as a pejorative for heavily commercialized or globalized things and concepts.

<i>Life After God</i> Short story collection by Douglas Coupland

Life After God is a collection of short stories by Douglas Coupland, published in 1994. The stories are set around a theme of a generation raised without religion. The jacket for the hardcover book reads "You are the first generation to be raised without religion." The text is an exploration of faith in this vacuum of religion. The stories are also illustrated by the author. Several critics have suggested that this publication marks an early shift in the stylistic vocabulary of Coupland and, according to one critic, he was "excoriated presumably for attempting be serious and to express depression and spiritual yearning when his reviewers were expecting more postmodern jollity". However, the short story would later come to garner more praise though critics and academics have paid little attention to the publication in terms of academics' articles and commentary.

Generation X is the demographic cohort following baby boomers.

<i>Shampoo Planet</i> 1992 English-language book by Douglas Coupland

Shampoo Planet is Douglas Coupland's second novel, published by Pocket Books in 1992. It is a thematic followup to Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The novel deals with Tyler, a Global Teen, who shares many characteristics of the character Tyler from Generation X, the younger brother of Andy, Generation X's narrator. The novel tells the story of Tyler's life as he arrives home from Europe, and the fallout of this trip and beyond.

A starter marriage is a first marriage that lasts five years or less and ends without the couple having any children together.

<i>JPod</i> 2006 novel by Douglas Coupland

JPod is a novel by Douglas Coupland published by Random House of Canada in 2006. Set in 2005, the book explores the strange and unconventional everyday life of the main character, Ethan Jarlewski, and his team of video game programmers whose last names all begin with the letter 'J'.

<i>Miss Wyoming</i> (novel) 2000 novel by Douglas Coupland

Miss Wyoming is a novel by Douglas Coupland. It was first published by Random House of Canada in January 2000.

<i>The Gum Thief</i> 2007 novel by Douglas Coupland

The Gum Thief is Canadian author Douglas Coupland's twelfth novel. It was published on September 25, 2007, by Random House Canada in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MTV Generation</span> Adolescents during the 1980s through 1990s

The MTV Generation refers to the adolescents and young adults of the 1980s to 1990s, a time when many were influenced by the television channel MTV, which launched in 1981. The term is not to be confused with Generation X. The development of MTV "had an immediate impact on popular music, visual style, and culture". Through this impact, MTV has shaped the MTV Generation and a new "cultural force".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Coupland</span> Canadian writer and graphic designer (born 1961)

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Villa Stuck.

<i>Generation A</i> (book) 2009 English-language novel by Douglas Coupland

Generation A is the thirteenth novel from Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. It takes place in a near future, in a world in which bees have become extinct. The novel is told with a shifting-frame narrative perspective, shifting between the novel's five main protagonists. The novel mirrors the style of Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is also a framed narrative. On September 30, 2009, Generation A was announced as a finalist for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize by The Writer's Trust of Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grunge lit</span> Australian literary genre

Grunge lit is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people living in suburban or inner-city surroundings, or in "in-between" spaces that fall into neither category. It was typically written by "new, young authors" who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences", of lower-income young people, whose egocentric or narcissistic lives revolve around a nihilistic or "slacker" pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom. The marginalized characters are able to stay in these "in-between" settings and deal with their "abject bodies". Grunge lit has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature. The term "grunge" is a reference to the US rock music genre of grunge.

<i>Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan</i> Book by Douglas Coupland

Marshall McLuhan is a biography written by Canadian author Douglas Coupland as a part of Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canadians series. It was published in March 2011 in the US by Atlas & Company under the title, "Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of my Work!". The American edition omits the preface describing the Extraordinary Canadians series by John Ralston Saul.

<i>Player One</i> Book by Douglas Coupland, October 2010

Player One: What Is to Become of Us is a novel written by Douglas Coupland for the 2010 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city: Vancouver on October 12, Regina on October 14, Charlottetown on October 19, Ottawa on October 25 and ending in Toronto on October 29. The lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas, November 8–12. The book was published by House of Anansi Press.

<i>The Nineties</i> (book) 2022 book by Chuck Klosterman

The Nineties: A Book is a 2022 book by Chuck Klosterman. It is an analysis of historical trends and pop culture phenomena in the decade of the 1990s. It was released February 8, 2022, by Penguin Books. It debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on February 27, 2022.

References

  1. "Book Reviews, Sites, Romance, Fantasy, Fiction". Kirkus Reviews.
  2. ISBN   978-0-307-35772-4 OCLC   317353344
  3. "Douglas Coupland". Bookclub. 7 March 2010. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  4. Gary Dexter, "History of the Name", The Sunday Telegraph, January 20, 2008
  5. Coupland, Doug. "Generation X." Vista, 1989.
  6. Mark Muro, "Baby Buster's Resent life in Boomers' Debris", The Boston Globe, November 10, 1991, City Edition
  7. Generation Jones news website
  8. Susan Chenery, "Into the City of the Mind", Sydney Morning Herald, August 22, 1994
  9. 1 2 3 Steve Lohr, "No More McJobs for Mr. X", The New York Times, May 29, 1994
  10. Leah McLaren, "Birdman of B.C.", The Globe and Mail, September 28, 2006
  11. Deirdre Donahue, "Douglas Coupland, chronicling post-boomers", USA Today, September 21, 1992
  12. Cunningham, Guy Patrick (2015). "Generation X". In Ciment, James (ed.). Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 596. ISBN   978-1-317-46235-4. The expression was later popularized by the American author Douglas Coupland, who borrowed it for the title of his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.
  13. Smith, Vicki, ed. (2013). Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2. SAGE Publications. pp. 1019–1020. ISBN   978-1-4522-7618-2. The term [McJob] was popularized by Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X.
  14. Coupland, Douglas (2021-06-21). "Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: 'Generational trashing is eternal'". The Guardian . Retrieved 2023-12-30.
  15. Brian Boyd, "Whatever Happened to the X Generations", The Irish Times, July 2, 1994
  16. Heads Up, CNN, April 30, 1994
  17. Tom Hodgkinson, "Age of the Cool Nerd", The Guardian, October 24, 1995
  18. Naomi Klein, "Being born again is easy in senile society", The Toronto Star, June 29, 1995
  19. Robert Benzie, "A One-Hit Wonder Generationally Xpired", The Toronto Sun, May 20, 1995

Further reading