The book that gave its name to Generation X

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The Accento publishing house has republished Generation, the 1991 novel written by Canadian Douglas Coupland which not only framed a generation – the one conventionally associated with people born between 1965 and 1980 – but also popularized the label with which it was nicknamed. The definition was so successful that since then subsequent generations have also been indicated with a letter: Gen Y, i.e. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996; Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012; and Gen Alpha, from 2013 to today.

– Read also: Generations have not always been there

The book was first published in the United States under the title Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by the US publisher St. Martin’s Press; it was brought to Italy by the Interno Giallo publishing house in 1992 in the translation by Marco Pensante (Generation X: Handbook for an accelerated culture), who has since translated other Coupland books and updated the translation of the newly released edition.

In fact, in the United States the book was a great cultural and sales success for having described, as the editor Matteo B. Bianchi explains in the preface, “the moral, ideological and sentimental disorientation” that twenty-year-olds of the time were experiencing; for them Coupland chose the letter X, the most suitable to indicate their “indefiniteness and unclassifiable”. Coupland said he took inspiration from a book by the American sociologist Paul Fussell, Classwhich called X a category of people who refused to care about making money and succeeding in life.

The letter from 1976 to 1981 it was also the name of musician Billy Idol’s punk band, inspired by the title of a 1964 book on British youth culture. Coupland, however, attributed a precise meaning to the expression and made it universal.

The many neologisms that Coupland invented were also very successful: some entered common language and are still used, especially in the United States. For example: McJob (a job with negligible pay, low prestige, low dignity, low personal fulfillment and no future, generally in the tertiary sector; often considered a satisfactory professional choice by people who have never been able to choose), Japanese minimalism (the architectural aesthetic most frequently found among young multi-career people without cultural roots), Mental Ground Zero (the place where you imagine yourself surprised by the explosion of an atomic bomb. It is often a shopping centre), Historical Overdose (living in a historical period in which too much seems to happen; among the main symptoms are addiction to newspapers, magazines and television news).

Generation it was also innovative from a graphic point of view: the text grid is accompanied by slogans, definitions and pop art cartoons, as if to understand that generation you needed a dictionary and live the experience of feeling pulled by distractions and invasive advertising.

Originally the book was supposed to be an essay commissioned from Coupland by St. Martin’s Press: it was supposed to expand an article of his published in Vancouver Magazine in 1987 in which he lamented the lack of prospects for those born, like him, in the 1960s (Coupland was born in 1961 and, strictly following the dates that define generations, was a baby boomer). Coupland went to live in the Coachella Valley, California, to work on the book and turned it into a novel, believing it was the best way to tell stories about twenty-somethings.

It is divided into three parts and chapters introduced by titles such as «I am not a target market», «Eat your parents», «The risk-free adventure is Disneyland». Despite the topicality of the theme and the originality, it has a rather traditional frame structure, like that of Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by the Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer, both written in the 14th century. The protagonists are three twenty-year-olds – Andy, Dag and Claire – who have left their families of origin and the conventional life that awaited them to live in bungalows in the Coachella Valley, and who organize picnics in the desert where they tell stories: « Either our lives become stories or there is no way we can finish them,” explains narrator Andy.

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Andy, Dag and Claire represent Generation who was looking for money and success), and to the optimistic vision of baby boomers, those born after the Second World War. They had experienced economic growth, technological innovations and had a better life than their parents: they earned more, they had more fun, progress seemed like the future.

Generation in the United States wages stopped growing, the austerity policies of the 1970s, and the precarization of work.

A page from the book with two definitions (Accento editions, 2024)

He witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States and their consumer and commercial power: it seemed that history had stopped forever, that there was nothing left to do, that everything what there was to experience had already been experienced before. All they had to do was withdraw from the system and take refuge in an imaginary world: «the Xs were and remain suspicious of the industrial system, of technologies and in general of any ideology. Rather, they wanted to build an existence that was singular, unique” Coupland himself explained to the magazine D.

A cartoon from the book (Accento editions, 2024)

Coupland has always denied being the spokesperson for Generation X; he actually explained that for him it didn’t exist, that he only wanted to tell the story of the way of life and feelings of a certain group of people. At a certain point he also said that Generation X was dead, absorbed by the system.

Douglas Coupland in Toronto, Canada, in 2012 (The Toronto Star/Zuma/Ansa)

After Generation, Coupland has written more than 25 books, including 13 novels, short story collections, essays, and screenplays for film and TV. Among the best known are Planet Shampoo (1992) in which he outlines the appearance of the “global teenagers”, which the press immediately nicknamed Generation Y; Microserfs (Microservos) on the birth of the tech industry in Silicon Valley; Girlfriend in a Coma (Girlfriend in a coma) about a girl who goes into a coma for 16 years after taking Valium and the consequences of her awakening; All Families Are Psychotic (All families are psychotic), about a dysfunctional Vancouver family that reunites to watch one of its members launch into space; JPod about the life of a group of video game programmers. It came out in 2009 Generation Awhich followed the structure of Generation and told of a post-apocalyptic world in which bees had become extinct and of five people united by the experience of being stung.

From 2000 Coupland also began to be an artist. He had studied art at university in Vancouver, where he graduated in 1984 with a thesis on sculpture; then he lived in Hawaii and Japan, working as an interior designer before moving back to Canada. He designed pieces of furniture and a clothing line sold in Paris by Colette, created a human-shaped installation made only of plastic objects (titled Spike) while his best-known work is the statue of a pixelated orca (Digital Orca) installed at the Port of Vancouver. His art is above all visual and the most complete retrospective dedicated to him was hosted at the Art Gallery of Vancouver in 2014. Since the 1980s he has collaborated and collaborated with newspapers and magazines such as Wired, Vice, Flash Art and the Financial Times.

Digital Orcathe pixelated orca statue created by Douglas Coupland for the port of Vancouver, Canada, January 14, 2018 (Darryl Dyck/CP/ABACAPRESS.COM/ANSA)

In a recent interview on D said that «A common thread among many Xs is how happy they are not to have had an iPhone when they were kids. We feel like we dodged a bullet. Yes, we actually dodged it.”

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Generation it is also available in audiobook format on Storytel Italia, where it is read by Vinicio Marchioni.