Douglas Coupland's Generation X is one of those books you always read about but never actually read. Maybe that makes it the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time.
Just kidding. Generation X is totally not like Fifty Shades of Grey. For one, X is a serious novel. For another, it's square, and Shades is more rectangular. Well, I guess it's not quite square, but it is an odd size: 8 1/4 inches by 9 1/2 inches. And the characters use heavily italicized dialogue, like this because I think Coupland means to make them sound like Lovey Howell or something.
That said, at one point while reading both books, the reader might be tempted to put the book down and exclaim to no one in particular something along the lines of, "Holy Christ, these people need a national fucking tragedy in the worst goddamn way." And thank god Saddam Hussein finally invaded Kuwait when he did, because if it weren't for him, then American troops wouldn't be stationed in the Arabian peninsula and Saudi women wouldn't be driving around in cars and all the sexually frustrated future jihadists would have nothing to be upset about and then the Cole wouldn't have been bombed and aspirin factories wouldn't have been bombed and the Towers would still be standing today and most of all, these three jokers in this goddamn book would probably still be hanging out in Baja California playing with each other's hair for the rest of their adult lives.
Which is to say, thank you Saddam, for saving us from ourselves.
Of course, it's not Coupland's fault that this really exceptional generation turned out to seem like such whiny navelgazers 20-plus years later. It's not his fault that these characters had the freedom and resources to not only get careerish jobs but actually turn their backs on those jobs. It's not his fault that a twentysomething today might look at these entitled pieces of shit and think, "Holy Christ, these people need a double-dip recession in the worst fucking way." No, it's not his fault, but at the same time you're kind of thinking that someone somewhere should have had some perspective, you know?
Now you could argue that Coupland may be fully aware of how unlikeable these characters are and that's the point of the book except that I don't think it's the point of the book. It doesn't read like a Flannery O'Connor-style takedown or a Neil LaBute-esque pillory. I think you can tell when the writer is critical of a character and this isn't that (plus, his own biographical details seem to match up too well with the characters).
The ironic thing — and I think this might be actual textbook irony and not just Alanis Morisette irony — which is to say that it's the Reality Bites definition of irony (which is when everything threatens to roll in on itself) — is that for all the distrust of the media and mass culture and whatnot in X, Coupland's book really sucks up to the whole zeitgeisticism of the era. We actually have a term for that in the 2010s, which is "fuck you."
The problem with contemporaneous periodizing is, one, periodizing is kind of a dopey OCD way to look at time, and two, time doesn't have to treat you well. The Lost Generation has scoreboard compared to these nitwits.
Here are some things, in no particular order, that scream "time capsule" about the book:
The intellectual foundations for "first world problems" (sometimes also sloppily/imprecisely/offensively referred to as "white people problems")
The protagonist's weird obsession with physical fitness
OK, so that's out of the way.
I think there are some other aspects that make the book seem less important in retrospect. One of the most striking things is how poorly whatever countercultural/anti-mass market impulses of the 1980s translated to today. The slogans in the margins in fonts that look like photocopied 'zines are ridiculous when you think about how fully youth culture has embraced big business and technology today. People — young people, 25-54 people, whoever and everyone — seems to care like not at all that Facebook basically owns your privacy. That's a sea change. It's like Douglas Coupland never happened. Can you imagine countercultural kids in the 1980s embracing a publicly traded company in the way that a gazillion weirdos deify Steve Jobs? You forget, until you read a time capsule like X.
And to expand on the technology angle, one of the more salient points of the book seems to be that absent strong familial bonds and a strong faith in career, young people are left floating and make new random families with other similarly rootless young people. I think that's there. And if it's not there then it's a fuckload more interesting than the other salient point, which is that cubicles are somehow bad for your health: If I had access to a photocopier and an endless supply of Microgramma typeface Letraset, I'd write something along the lines of, "Get The Fuck Over Ourselves" or "Lay Off Yourself" or "Like All Good Things In Life, You Eventually Have To Pinch It Off."
Which puts X of a piece with Bowling Alone, another book I always read about but never actually read. And like Alone, X seems really moot — what people may lack in real families these days they more than make up for in virtual families. No one today seems that rootless or moody or rootlessly moody because no one ever has to be. No one today is wanting for self-expression, self-reflection or whatever you want to call it. And no one has to worry about a cubicle because you're probably working shit freelance assignments from home. Tom Friedman pwns you, you Gen X pussy.
Meatball and Goober started this meme the other day about how my problem is somehow that the perfect ends up being the enemy of the good, which is fine, whatever, I don't care. But the mediocre and inane is also the enemy of the good, and without picking too much on Coupland's book in particular, which I don't think merits a come-to-Jesus about shit being either perfect or good or even just OK, I think of something a professor said to his classes about building a solid argument holds true here: A table needs four legs to stand, otherwise it's not really that useful as a table. Which is to say, even though he was a Yuppie asshole, I don't think Tobias was all that bad in the end. But maybe I just didn't get it at all . . .
So when Craig suggested David Farley's An Irreverent Curiosity for book club, and the club picked it to read, he Tweeted to the author that we were reading his book. Farley responded to Craig that he would come to our book club if we wanted, and he did!
As an aside, Twitter is kind of a funny idea. Funny in that Craig — I surmised — was basically pinging Farley to say that we were reading his book. Which is to say, that while yes, he has 537 followers, in a way it's a private-ish message to Farley, because how many of those 537 people are paying attention to their Twitter feed at that particular moment? And even if they are, what do people really care about what he's reading in his book club? Meanwhile, Farley, if he's anything like the rest of everyone, is checking to see who is mentioning him, so he'll definitely get the message.
Goober, Jen and I were talking about stuff last night and I brought up that stuff like Twitter reinforces a larger passive-aggressiveness in, um, society or the world nowadays. In that, you can bitch about something to @AmericanAir and then some poor schlubs who man the @AmericanAir Twitter account respond to your complaint, and maybe even faster based on your Klout, whatever the fuck that is. Time was, you had to write letters to get shit. Now we just Tweet a bunch of passive-aggressive complaints and hope the number of followers we have will scare companies into providing customer service.
(Speaking of @AmericanAir, what kind of foolish bullshit kind of Tweet is this? A warmed-over Tolkien quote about traveling? What the fuck for? And why has it been retweeted 124 times as of June 20, 2012 at 11:19 p.m.? And "favorited" 31 times? Twitter is great, it precipitates revolutions and allows famous people to communicate directly to their fans. And then 124 people retweet some shit the American Airlines communications department puts out there, and you're like . . . Jesus fucking Christ.)
Goober noted that he's seen a bunch of examples of people talking shit on Facebook, as if what they say won't somehow get back to whoever it was they were writing about. That's when you start to think that the Internet's greatest achievement is legitimizing passive-aggressive behavior.
It's funny because it also occurred to me how dumb it is that people get upset about people who talk behind other people's backs. Because outside of Jesus Christ, who never talks behind someone's back? Everyone talks behind everyone else's back — and there's a good reason for this, which is that 90 percent of the time, you don't want someone talking to someone's front. That's what gets people hurt. Or worse.
Clearly not. I'm a pussy in that way. And while I felt like I got a sense of the author's personality from his first-person book, part of me worried that we were inviting over James Agee, who would want to fuck us, or Henry Miller, who would give us bed bugs or something. But that didn't happen either — Farley's actually a really nice guy, and we had a really cool discussion about the book, as well as the process of writing it and the practical matter of finally seeing it in print. We (read: I) harassed him about the nitty gritty of writing — and he answered all our questions, which was very generous and very cool. He told us some behind the scenes stuff, which was also cool. And that he gets more than his share of queries about circumcision, because of course he's an expert on that now.
And fortunately, An Irreverent Curiosity is also an interesting book about a quirky, interesting topic, and while it was a little frustrating — to me, at least (i.e., not everyone — or anyone — else) — that the book ends with the author so close to resolving his search without finding a resolution, and while I did actually briefly mention that to the author, it didn't take away from the general experience.
So in other words, we were cool. And which is why the book becomes a little beside the point. So let me fix that now.
The "irreverent curiosity" in An Irreverent Curiosity is a relic that was once in a Catholic church in a small town in Italy outside of Rome. If you've never come across a relic in a Catholic church, the whole thing might come as kind of a surprise, but one day you'll be in a European church and your wife, who happens to be a lapsed Catholic and knows about such stuff, will direct your attention to some ornate object and point to the center of it where there will be a small nose bone or toe bone or ear bone or something and before you can say "Why is there a human bone embedded in an ornate gold cross?" or some such, she'll explain that it's a relic and that there was a time in the Catholic church when people dug up bones and worshiped them. Or whatever it is people do with relics. And your mind is momentarily blown until you hear a story like the kind that Farley relates, which is that one of these relics happens to have been — supposedly — Jesus' foreskin. Thus the concept of the irreverent curiosity.
The Holy Foreskin, as it was known, was stolen — or disappeared — in the early 1980s. So Farley's book goes over the mystery of where it went while he contextualizes it in the history of relics, throwing in some history and first-person stories about the quirky Italian town where the relic once resided.
Now you may be thinking — as I did for the first three-quarters of the book — that it's kind of absurd to think that anyone could have Jesus' foreskin. And then it occurs to you — after remembering all the Christmas creches you've seen — that a lot of folks believe in the story of the horsemen or wise men or virgins or whatnot, so in that worldview, of course someone would preserve the son of God's foreskin.
There's a parallel between the belief in the foreskin and the desire to see a story with an airtight resolution that merits some thought but which I can't quite put together right now, especially after all these paragraphs. So that's kind of a cop-out.
So basically there's this class of baby book that's designed for very small babies. We (read: I) didn't know about this type of book before Animal came along. My recollection of children's books skewed toward Seuss and The Runaway Pancake. Like a lot of stuff about early childhood, it all kind of runs together in a blob between age 0 and middle school, and it's unclear what happened when and, therefore, what happens when.
So this one baby book that we got — I don't know if we just got it or if it's something we (read: Jen) asked for — is called Squishy Turtle and Friends. And every time we look at it, it kind of blows our minds.
I mean, sure, Squishy Turtle and Friends is only six pages long, but what do we know about what babies like? Maybe they don't need a complicated multi-story plot. Maybe they don't care about character development. Maybe they're not wowed by tremendously adept turns of phrase.
Look, I get that half the joy of "books" like Squishy Turtle is that they're crinkly and children can suck on them. But every time we read — or more accurately, allow Animal to manhandle it — we keep thinking that the book seems rather, I don't know, thin.
I don't know how Fair Use laws apply to children's books, especially when they're "tactile," but it's difficult to discern how much of a six-page book can be excerpted. Seriously, where's the cutoff? Oh well, here we go.
Like all good children's books, Squishy Turtle can be a little dark. Take the ominous first line, for example: "Little fish with shiny scales are fleeing from alarming whales!" Turtle moves along in this vein for five more pages, illustrating a murky world of inter-species violence.
Not to sound like a dick, but the line "Gently bobbing up and down is how a sea horse gets around" (page 4) is crying out to be rewritten, in the bawdy way. Let your imagination go with that one.
The final lines — "The ocean floor is deep and dark. It's where you'll find this hungry shark." — make you think you're missing something. Yes, yes — it's a baby book — but why treat them like they're illiterate?
Now you may be wondering, as we were, if this is Squishy Turtle and Friends, well then where and when the fuck does the title character show up? That goes unanswered.
At this point, however, you have to wonder if there's a sort of commentary going on in the book's title. Yes, Squishy Turtle never actually appears in Squishy Turtle, but is that because of Squishy Turtle's inherent makeup? I.e., he/she is squishy, and thus equivocal? At the very least, it's worth considering.
The whole thing was kind of perplexing, so Jen finally just Googled it, and came across the Amazon page for the book. And that's where we saw it: When Squishy Turtle was first published back in 2003 it was eight pages!
So in cutting down the books to six pages, Squishy Turtle joins Dannon Yogurt, Dial Soap and every other example of "wonderful new packaging" that seeks to cut costs by literally cutting corners.
Look, do I dislike Turtle? No. Clearly not. But I was disappointed by Turtle, in part for his squishiness and in part because I think it's just a bad example to set for the children. Because, after all, when it comes down to it, that's all that matters.
