kilinahe's Full Review: Douglas Coupland - Generation X: Tales for an Acce...
Dag, Andy and Claire are three ultra-hip Gen X'ers. They are all working meaningless jobs, but they like it that way. They're escaping from the evils of capitalism and corporate culture. Or something like that.
This is MTV's "Real World" on paper, minus three or four people. The characters are roommates from various backgrounds. Claire is a rich girl who's rebelling by slumming it in the desert; Andy is an former corporate slave; Dag is the generic freak. There's no real plot; just a lot of appropriately quirky anectodes strung together amid lots of pop-culture references.
Douglas Coupland has a point to make, but what is it? He's trying to parody American society, but he's trying to do that by using stereotypical characters that we can't even care about. They don't have any real personality traits, good or bad, except their frustration over being raised in a non-culture.
Coupland is trying to speak to people of my generation. He didn't speak to me. I couldn't relate to the characters' trendy cynicism. They hate the environment they grew up in, but it seems as if they don't really mean it; they're just embracing Gen-X angst.
There are some laugh-out-loud moments. Coupland is a decent writer; he describes the book's desert setting expertly. Less pretentious characters would suit him better.
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