Fake Plastic Trees

[A bit more, about that dreadful novel that dare not speak its name. This picks up where the last section left off ... but the final paragraph is still up in the air as I plan to flesh out the Slacker and Nirvana parts.]

The man credited with giving rise to the term "Generation X" had no plans to do so. In March 1991, Douglas Coupland was a 28-year-old writer from Vancouver just thrilled to see his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, published. The book, which follows three twentysomethings who have dropped out of the rat race to pursue more fulfilling lives, had a modest print run and little fanfare. Coupland admitted the initial publication had "no publicity, and received almost no reviews." But for a pair of unrelated occurrences across the American landscape, Coupland's novel would have faded into obscurity.

In summer 1991, as Coupland's novel mostly gathered dust, moviegoers discovered the movie Slackers, which featured a cast "filled with overeducated and underoccupied oddballs who loosely paralleled the characters in my book," Coupland explained in 1995. Filmmaker Richard Linklater, a twentysomething from Texas, had unwittingly produced a thread running parallel to Coupland's that exposed more people to the quirky habits of some members of their generation.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the rainy city and a gloomy economy steered disaffected youth toward a musical style known as "grunge" that would take the world by storm. When the growling, catchy sound of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" lit up request lines at MTV and radio stations nationwide, leading to a worldwide invasion of the Seattle sound, the generation had its voice. That the voice of grunge rockers like Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain was not a happy one, or that it did not reflect the views of a whole generation, mattered as little to the chroniclers of pop culture as did the fact that Coupland's and Linklater's characters were not representative samples of twentysomethings.

"As the media goes, two's nothing, but three's a trend," Coupland observed wryly. In a New York minute, the Canadian writer's term "Generation X," the Texas filmmaker's use of "slacker," and the Seattle music dubbed "grunge" fused together to become the totems of a new generation – and, moreover, the Next Big Thing for trendwatchers, the popular media and marketers.

Since the name came from Coupland's book, it is worth quickly exploring its contents and how its characters came to become symbols of a new generation. Its three main characters – Andrew, Dag and Claire – dropped out mainstream society to work in underachieving "McJobs" (defined by Coupland as "low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future" positions) to live their lives in a kind of bohemian hedonism in and around Palm Springs, California. They are tragically hip figures, spouting pop philosophy and forever referencing films and television shows. They are also far from typical of the millions of twentysomethings who toiled through college, climbed rungs on the corporate ladder, or started their own businesses during the early 1990s. Yet the media found something fascinating and cool about the characters, as well as parallels between the book's three protagonists and the aimless characters in Linklater's film and the howling acts coming out of Seattle. No matter how unrealistic or unrepresentative, the poster children for the 1990s had been drawn, and mass marketed, often by observers who understood little about the world of what increasingly came to be known as "Generation X."