I know this book was some what groundbreaking when it first came out. It gave voice to a generation that was floundering and in need of recognition. This book helped give it shape and relevance. However, reading it now, fifteen years after the initial media blitz over the generation dubbed “X” it doesn’t feel like anything special. Now fifteen years worth of Xers have lived through the directionlessness, the student debt, the housing crunch, the economic highs and lows, and the problems the characters in the book face feel mundane. They’re so typical they’re uninteresting.

While I enjoyed the stories Dag, Andy, and Claire tell one another, the tone of the book is often a bit too esoteric, placing the problems these three face squarely in their own psyches rather than in real world dilemmas, thus making much of the action internal.

If asked, I don’t think I’d recommend this to another reader. If you’ve survived your twenties or are in the process of doing so, there’s nothing this book will tell you that you don’t already know.

read this when it was first published.

Penetrating, cynically witty in parts, and sad, but too clever by half and sorta hollow, slipshod and packaged, in the same way much of what he is offhandedly criticizing is. Perhaps this is a conscious decision, but it doesn’t really work for me. Seems more quotable than readable so far.