Indeed, the three central characters seem so annoying at first that (for all its dazzling intelligence and lexical ingenuity) I found Generation X dull.
They seem fortunate, innocent and irritating. In the middle of a recession, it's hard to feel sympathy for Coupland's clever-clever characters, Andy, Claire and Dag, as they sit around the pool in Palm Springs and affect depression because their jobs aren't fulfilling enough. But it's also unsettling because so much now seems distant.
So much of it has become engrained that it's surprising to be reminded that it was once new – that one person coined all those ideas and terms. Even so, reading Generation X almost 20 years after it was written is a strange experience. The fact that the book is so tied-in to its era is also a mark of how well he was able to situate it. Nor can Coupland be held responsible for the passing of time. And there's a particularly cruel irony to the fact that a book describing a group of people for whom advertising is anathema (it even contains a chapter titled " I Am Not A Target Market") became the basis of so much global branding - an irony that Coupland himself must have been all too aware of when he declared that the idea of Generation X was dead (in Details magazine in 1995): the victim of too much marketing. The fact that he's so often quoted is a sign of his talent rather than otherwise.
Meanwhile, just as the phrase "capturing the zeitgeist" now sounds ugly and stale (assuming it ever didn't), so a lot of Generation X has grown tired and perhaps over-familiar with age. As this review is already showing, the buzzwords steal the focus of the novel. The trouble is that such a gift is also its own curse. I can think of few writers better ( as so many commentators liked to write of Coupland back in the 1990s) at "capturing the zeitgeist". It's hard to remember a time when these weren't cultural commonplaces. "McJob", "mental ground zero", "celebrity schadenfreude", "occupational slumming". Just as effective were many of the other words and phrases that Coupland himself defines (in what now seems a rather awkward stylistic quirk) at the bottom of his pages.
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