He wrote about glam metal in the ’90s in a useful and personal way, with all the breeziness and sense of irony common to Gen Xers. Klosterman’s first book, Fargo Rock City (2001, Scribner), included many kinds of non-fiction-sometimes memoir, sometimes journalism, sometimes criticism.
Now here I sit at the grand old age of 40, having held my breath for Chuck Klosterman for very many moons. This is a weak case either because a heavily marketed book isn’t the same thing as a zeitgeisty book or because no generation should hold up a man who died by suicide as the voice that speaks for their collective. A handful of people said the voice of Gen X was actually David Foster Wallace, based on the strength of Infinite Jest alone (Little Brown, 1996). Although which generation I belong to is itself a controversy, depending on whether you think October 1981 is ten months too late or you think, as I do, that Generation Catalano is a thing.īefore the ’90s were even over, Coupland immersed himself in Silicon Valley culture and the perspectives of those who came after Gen X. There’s more than one way to be the voice of any generation and maybe this is just the usual skepticism of a Gen Xer here, but it always seemed to me that the strongest voices would be the ones that emerged later during the middle age of a generation, as opposed to writers like Coupland who resonated within the contemporaneous moment of my generation’s youth. During the ’90s, people said that author and artist Douglas Coupland was “the voice of Gen X” maybe because his first novel put it right there in the title, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (St Martin’s, 1991).
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