Among all of the zeitgeisty commentary, slacker chic and cultural insights in Generation X come snappy descriptions of the landscape of post-Reaganite America, which Britain was swift to copy. Is it a novel? Is it linked stories? Yes. One of the tales, ‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’, features some terrific descriptions of the Mojave Desert, where we hear that nuclear scientists once came to get drunk, crash their cars and get eaten by desert rats. Dag, one of the central trio in the book, tells a story of Otis, a man who goes to explore the atomic bomb craters of New Mexico. On his way back Otis spots a landscape of malls. “He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers.” He then drives by a new yuppie housing development, equally shocking in coral pink. Otis thinks “‘Hey! These aren’t houses at all – these are malls in disguise.’” It’s a tale told in the flat blankness of slacker style, withheld and arch, and its descriptions of landscapes are informed by Coupland’s other career as a graphic designer, all surfaces and image. And it is no less powerful and moving for that.
First published in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, St Martin’s Press 1991
A Personal Anthology 