Generation X

Douglas Coupland's Generation X is a novel about the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s―people in their twenties who have given up on finding meaning in life. The book's three main characters, Andy, Claire, and Dag, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, they develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs―low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry. The trio creates its 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 their highly fortified inner worlds emerges―peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.