The world is going to end in a great ball of nuclear fission, and all the Pepsi bottles from all the landfills in Michigan and the great plastic garbage bag continent floating in the North Atlantic will be vaporized and instantly kicked up into a whirlwind the size of Australia. The prevailing winds from the fallout are going to rain down liquid polymers all across the eastern seaboard and well into Manitoba, instantly fossilizing anyone caught by surprise, fusing charred flesh with bits of snow fence and dismembered GI Joe arms and legs. And when a society arises from the ashes, half-cockroach half-Nebraska field hands who's ancestors happened to be exploring Cold war bomb shelters at just the right time, they'll stare in awe at the Tableau of bipedal Titans frozen in time, wearing big bead necklaces and kaki shorts standing in line for chances to win six months of free text messaging.
Thanks to Canada Reads 2010 and Douglas Coupland, I've had to re-evaluate my stance on reading in public, kinder eggs and hygiene for hygiene's sake.
Verdict: I cannot say I am very fond of Generation X.
The heros of this novel clumsily hate all things plastic, workaday and futile. Drinking themselves numb in the desert at what they suspect and hope is the end of the world, they tell beautiful little stories, true or otherwise, and seek out small measures of epiphany all the while minding their waistlines and abandoning all but the purely masochistic sexual relationships. Dropping completely the ambition and money lust that characterized the eighties so appropriately for middle class America (Alex P. Keaton be Damned).
Wikipedia declares that I belong to this navel grazing subcategory, and insofar as it means I am angst ridden, I suppose they have an argument. So houses are too expensive, job security is a thing of the past (hehe) and the world is free falling to disaster whether I tell it to stop or not. But I came of age in the tech boom and bust, where kids with vague ideas were driving cars normally reserved for first round draft picks, all on the tabs of Boomers and their mutual funds who had sensibly weathered a handful of nifty recessions and figured it all was fine and dandy. There really is one born every minute and since we're not running out of bubbles any time soon all these fatalists could have had their three-car garages if they had slugged it out for another 5 years.
Cynical is not the same as intelligent, but Coupland declares everyone should stare at his protagonists as if they were dilettante sages in a world gone stupid. They can only feel in ironies; imagine achieving enlightenment by rolling your eyes for seven years.
Maybe if I was born five years earlier, and in an AMC Javelin on it's third clutch, and tended bar across the street from a boarding house where William Burroughs once got arrested, maybe then I would "Get" Generation X, and then Ms. Ryder would be asking for MY number.
The saving grace of this book is the ending, a moment of beauty that has to be read to be believed and is really quite something.
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