Review - Generation X

Any good book will make you think. This one actually changes the way you think. For a few days. I could feel it happening, phrase by phrase, idea by idea. Reprogrammed by stealth, during and for a few days after reading this book I looked at the world differently. Tourists who have spent time in communist countries where they are exposed to no advertising (just crude propaganda easily filtered out – if you can go through life not really seeing all those soft drink adverts, then you can sure as hell ignore posters boasting about tractor production) often talk of a culture shock on arriving home, of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of message they are confronted with, before their filter readjusts. This book changes your filter so that you don’t confront the information, you embrace it, making you wryly aware that you are being exploited, but the result is a smile and a shrug, not resentment. It’s like those books that tell you about where your supermarket chicken comes from, but this one doesn’t result in your purchase of a flamethrower.

The three central characters love telling stories, a handy device as it means that all those short stories too short to publish on their own, but just too good to leave in a draw forever, see the light of day. After a while you stop noticing that the impromptu, campfire story telling is about as subtle as a some fresh faced youth exclaiming ‘let’s put on the show right here!’ in a teen movie from the age of innocence and lots of brylcreme.

Shorter still are the definitions of the terms Coupland can lay claim to popularising, even if he didn’t invent them, including ‘mcjob’; which is probably the most famous, but is far from the best (see – association with a corporation lifted the very word unfairly ahead of its competition).

The consistent theme of the book is the future. In true bursts of short term nostalgia the book recalls events from the recent past as evidence that we are, in fact, living in the future; the main character recalls travelling on a Boeing 747 to see an eclipse, another describes accidentally spilling petrol and being told by his father that petrol ‘smells like the future’.

Another theme is the End Of The World. This is tackled in a number of ways, the most obvious being apocalypse campfire stories that are, for those that were of an impressionable age during the 1980s (Culture Club, AIDS, Regan, Thatcher, if you were as impressionable as wet clay you grew up confused, scared and angry, like being a teen cubed) acutely recall the very real fear that The Bomb was going to end the world, although in our heads the end of the world was never described so painfully simply as it is here; the image of the ceiling of the supermarket – polystyrene tiles – liquefying and falling upwards in a nuclear blast is one that will stay with me for a long time.

An offshoot is living in the end of days. Traditional families are seen as dysfunctional, not even reuniting for Christmas (horror!), while the three main characters almost live together and are certainly supportive of one another, a family in all but blood. The book opens with dogs feeding on human fat, but because they raided the bins behind a liposuction clinic rather than savaged a tramp it’s an ‘ewwwwww’ moment rather than a shriek. When one of the characters accidentally spills potentially radioactive glass beads all over another character’s apartment, this is seen as an inconvenience and they break out the hoover, not the lead shielding.

For a book about three twentysomethings living in Palm Springs and working in the service industry, there’s a hell of a lot going on in here. If, sometime in the far future, the supercomputers that were built to look after a mankind now long extinct started to malfunction and fail bit by bit, the stories in this book and the characters that inhabit it are the sort of people that the flickering, fading, artificial intelligence would have as imaginary friends – if its circuits were immersed in gin.