
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.


Calling the novel Generation A was, as far as book titling goes. The narrative is written from alternating first-person points of view, a tactic that harkens back to Generation X. The term Generation A was in fact coined by Kurt Vonnegut, but Coupland embraces it and makes it his own. popular culture as a result of Douglas Couplands 1991 book Generation X. Those trying to solve the crises hang around the fringes, poking and prodding the protagonists into giving up their secrets. Generation A, Douglas Coupland’s 11th novel, is a great bookend to Generation X, the novel that launched his career. 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. What Gen X Women Want at Work and How Their Boomer Bosses Can Help Them Get It. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland 27,935 ratings, 3.74 average rating, 1,221 reviews Generation X Quotes Showing 1-30 of 37 Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human beings eyes.
