Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the
generation born from 1960 to 1978--a generation known until then simply
as twenty somethings.
Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs
in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in
the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of
story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--low-pay, low-prestige,
low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry. They create their
own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors
and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of
nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.
A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly
emerges--peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism,
pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for
permanence, love, and their own home.
Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely
private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears,
and no culture to replace their anomie.