Douglas generation x6/3/2023 And there's a particularly cruel irony to the fact that a book describing a group of people for whom advertising is anathema (it even contains a chapter titled " I Am Not A Target Market") became the basis of so much global branding - an irony that Coupland himself must have been all too aware of when he declared that the idea of Generation X was dead (in Details magazine in 1995): the victim of too much marketing. The fact that he's so often quoted is a sign of his talent rather than otherwise. Meanwhile, just as the phrase "capturing the zeitgeist" now sounds ugly and stale (assuming it ever didn't), so a lot of Generation X has grown tired and perhaps over-familiar with age. As this review is already showing, the buzzwords steal the focus of the novel. The trouble is that such a gift is also its own curse. I can think of few writers better ( as so many commentators liked to write of Coupland back in the 1990s) at "capturing the zeitgeist". It's hard to remember a time when these weren't cultural commonplaces. "McJob", "mental ground zero", "celebrity schadenfreude", "occupational slumming". Just as effective were many of the other words and phrases that Coupland himself defines (in what now seems a rather awkward stylistic quirk) at the bottom of his pages.
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