Whenever I feel myself succumbing to dangerous levels of loathing and doubt, burnt out by all the culture offered up so graciously to me as a target market, I reach for the old favourites, the comfort reads. In doing this, however, there is always a hidden anxiety: what if we’ve grown apart? What if the changes of the years apart have caused irreperable damage to our relationship? What if we just don’t click like we used to? I first read Generation X in my first year of university, gleeful at the contents of the multiple university libraries which had so many books I’d always wanted to read but local and school libraries never stocked. I don’t exactly recall my initial reaction, but I’ve since devoured everything else Douglas Coupland has written, so I imagine it must have been fairly positive. So, I dug out my copy of the neon pink covered Generation X and, despite the fear and possibility of disappointment, got stuck into it.

The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live our life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”
I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert – to tell stories and to make our lives worthwhile tales in the process.

I’m not sure if back in 2003 I quite would have appreciated the blunt truths offered in Coupland’s novel, those moments of acidic humour that cut to the core of post-war Western consumer existence. Let’s face it, I was eighteen with the whole world ahead of me and still believed I was on the cusp of immersing myself in a world of thoughts and ideas that would open up numerous opportunities that I couldn’t even fathom. Uh, yeah. But now, with most (oh my god) of my twenties behind me, I come to Generation X with a different perspective, from the point where you’re no longer “the youth” anymore, and a new generation is fast usurping your own (which you never quite felt apart of anyway), and you realize that although you’re supposed to be an adult, you have no fucking idea what you’re supposed to be doing.

And for this particularly knotty stage of life, Generation X is perfect. Admittedly, there are some differences between the generation of the characters of the novel and my own – theirs is a landscape noticeably untouched by the internet, although the comic frames and neologisms within the text do point toward that sort of multi-textuality that we’d become used to with the growth of the internet; and if this is an accelerated culture, what can we say about ours, hyper-acceleration? (an issue Coupland would expand upon in 2009′s Generation A) – but the general sense of distrust of consumer culture, of apathy and exhaustion, of alienation and of the unknown, still resonates strongly, perhaps the byproduct of mid-twenties malaise no matter the generational setting. Here there is the pleasure of small recognitions of self and experience which legitimize those experiences and perceptions, or at the very least, offer the consolation that you are not alone in sensing the strangeness, the contradictory and the futile.

But I get this feeling–
It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we’re middle class.
You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.
And any small moment of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning’s will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Okay, so that’s all my guts spewed up in words for all to see, but what about the actual novel? Generation X features three twenty-somethings, Andy, Dag and Claire, who have removed themselves from their peers and their expectations to work menial jobs in California, where they tell stories to each other, revealing truths about themselves and their lives through fiction and an extensive frame of cultural reference and understanding, in this way being able to openly speak about and simultaneously cover up the unspeakable fears they hold about where their lives are headed. It’s not all doom and generational gloom, but it’s also sharp and funny. While Generation X hails the power of stories and fiction to give us control over our lives, I wonder whether the search for our own narrative is also the very thing that entangles us with this distinct anxiety and alienation, especially when our narratives don’t measure up to those we see in film, television, literature, internet, other people?

What have I learned from this rereading experience? That Generation X and I have not grown apart, nor are we disgusted by our slight changes over time, but that we are closer than ever, a sort of book and reader eclipse in which our stories begin to overlap. It may not always be this way, we’ve both got a lot of changing to do yet, but for now, the pages between these blindingly neon covers are of the greatest comfort.