Great… and yet bad at the same time? Maybe so, when it comes to one milestone book at least. Let me explain.
One of the most prolific readers I know is Keith, aka the “Nostalgic Italian.” He often posts little reviews of the books he reads (or listens to on audio while commuting) and not long ago he asked if people felt compelled to finish reading a book that they began reading even if it wasn’t really interesting them. I was of the opinion, no! Time’s too short and too valuable to just spend it reading a book you’re getting nothing from.
Of course, the issue there is how to gauge that. Many books I’ve ended up liking started a little slow, so the question becomes how far does one go before knowing it’s going to be a dud? For me, the answer seems to often be around 50 pages in. Less than that, if it’s not totally awful (and if it was, it’s unlikely I would have picked it up to begin with), may be too soon to really give you an accurate impression. Much more than that and I’m wasting time. Besides, once you hit about ¾ of the way, you’re probably then going to want to know the ending, even if it’s not a compelling story, right? This is on my mind because I just gave up on one book, for now at least, that was one that was very inspiring to me years ago. One which defined my generation and showed that it was OK to break the “rules” of serious writing. It’s alright to have illustrations with your fictional prose, OK to have random appendices and things of interest on the page along with the story. There’s no law that says your characters have to be larger than life nor that says the strict genre formats must be yours. Of course, as you may have guessed, I’m referring to Generation X, by Douglas Coupland.
Coupland didn’t actually first come up with the phrase “generation X” – for example, Billy Idol was in a band with that name a full decade before the book came out in 1991 – but he did popularize it and drop the identity on all of us born between the mid-’60s and early-’80s. (Since then we’ve turned over “youth” to the Millennials, who in turn have given way to Gen Z, those born too late to have any memory of 9/11). The book became a best-seller and seemingly a guidebook for “my” people.
I can’t remember when exactly I first read it, nor even if it was the first book by Coupland I went through. He quickly became a popular author and all of his releases in the ’90s at least were omni-present, not only in bookstores, but department stores, even record shops at time. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. is among his many fans. The covers were bright and eye-catching, the books at times in unusual sizes. All adding to the cool factor.
His books resonated with me. The characters seemed ordinary, like people I might know. Most of the stories were not “big” – there were no huge explosions, no superheroes battling costumed super-villains or trying to knock an asteroid headed for the earth off its trajectory, no tales of Mafioso or lives of the ultra-wealthy. royals. To many a traditional editor, it may have seemed they lacked plot. But there were often little doodles in the margin to illustrate his points and in the case of Generation X, a little pseudo-dictionary of new terminology to fit our age group. Of those, “McJob” probably became the most famous and widely-used : “ a low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.” I didn’t grow up with many people who didn’t have at least one of those in their young lives. It was nice to see a book with characters I could personally relate to, ones who weren’t super-wealthy, super-villains or even super-memorable from the outside.
It validated me as an aspiring writer. I felt I could write, and I had some stories to tell, but I was intimidated by the books and magazines about writing I came across. They all, to a point of predictability, rolled out the same “rules” one “had to” follow if one wanted any chance whatsoever of being published, let alone noticed. Your book had to have a clear choice of genre – Western, romance, murder mystery etc. Each one of those had their own rules, guidelines … how many words (usually about 60 000), length of the chapters, plot outline. If your a murder mystery person, don’t try to make your book funny. Do have your murdered victim someone no reader is going to care too deeply about, but make sure they’re not so despicable the readers won’t care to see the killer brought to justice. And it must be solved by some unlikely amateur sleuth, not a professional P.I., let alone the police. In a romance, an exotic setting was recommended, and the hero has to win the heroine twice…once, then lose her because of some conflict (usually to another not-quite-equal suitor) before finally prevailing. And so on. I’ve read some good books that follow those descriptions, but my problem was … I didn’t want to write any like that.
I wanted to write about people I felt like I knew or could relate to, people in basically ordinary lives but having interesting things happen in their own little way. I wanted some comedy, some drama, maybe some romance. Put it all in a blender. Coupland suggested to me that I could do so, but what’s more, there were others like me who might find value in such work. That was an important change in mindset for me. As a sidenote, I met Douglas once and was able to tell him that. He thanked me and said that meant a lot to him.
He’s gone on to write a slew of books since. I’ve read quite a few, and thoroughly enjoy most. Honestly, most I’ve come across outdo his first Some are fiction, like The Gum Thief, which takes place mostly within a Staples big box store. Or Eleanor Rigby … oh yes, another thing he likes to do is draw from pop culture and give it relevance to the characters (which isn’t very fictional when it comes to most people if you think about it.) Others are non, like Souvenir of Canada, parts 1 and 2, which are basically like pop culture dictionaries of Canadiana big on photos (like me, he’s from the Great White North). Some seem to blur the lines and mix the two… Polaroids from the Dead has sections describing what the L.A. neighborhood OJ Simpson lived in was like and a report from a Grateful Dead concert but also ten short stories of fiction. Try selling an old-school publisher on a book like that. But yet, he did and it works.
But back to Generation X. It was widely credited for giving our part of society its stereotyped behaviors – being “Slackers”, not caring much about our jobs, being vaguely dissatisfied with everything but not ambitious enough to rebel against the system and change things, jaded about relationships because of rampant divorces we saw as we grew up. Certainly some are, or at least were true of some of Generation X (the cohort) as shown in Generation X, the book. But as I slogged through this for the first time in many years, I found it more and more tedious. I frankly didn’t care about any of the three main characters, Dag, Claire and Andy, three slackers who’ve dropped out of mainstream society to live in a nearly abandoned neighborhood in the California desert, eking out a living working at a bar and spending most of their days drinking, eating junk food, staring at the sky and telling each other stories about space colonies where everyone works at a 7-11 and gets fired by it or people who crack at work or else Yuppies who are “Androids who never get jokes, and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence like an underfed chihuahua, baring its tiny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top with the violet filaments of a bug barbeque.” And yes, they talk like that in the book.
It’s been said of the TV show Friends, perhaps it was so popular for so long because it was about Gen X-ers, adored by Gen X-ers but also by other ages as well. They all had McJobs somewhere along the way, they were all a little jaded by things their parents had done or they’d experienced, and as one of them pointed out they were all prone to hang out at a coffee shop on a weekday at 11 in the morning. But they were all likable in their own way, and all had aspirations. They felt their lives had meaning and could get better. That’s something that can be cheered for.
So… a book that undoubtedly began at least a little change in the world of publishing regarding what can or cannot be done, inspired other young writers and was nearly profound in changing my way of thinking about my own capabilities. That’s an important book by my estimations. But, honestly, not one I particularly want to read anymore.
Everydave Life 