SOURCE: “Generation X and the End of History,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 58, Spring, 1996, pp. 229-40.

In the following essay, Lainsbury examines the philosophical and cultural context of Coupland's Generation X.

Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is an example of that rarest of literary phenomena—a “serious” novel that has achieved widespread popular recognition. According to the perverse logic of the literary establishment, the novel's popularity calls into question its validity as a literary text. And yet this is a novel worth looking at seriously, if only for the influence it has had on contemporary culture. Generation X achieves its effects by taking aim at concerns close to the heart of middle-class, North American life, an intention dismissed by contemporary critics obsessed with the appeal of the marginal, the ethnic, the oppressed—anything but the kind of relatively comfortable, suburban, middle-class existence that...