Details made a list of the
25 best Generation X books, representing "authors who composed their masterpieces on computers instead of Underwoods, and were affected more directly by Nintendo than Nagasaki." Oscar Wao makes an appearance, as do THE CORRECTIONS, EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU, RANDOM FAMILY and A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this list is way more enticing than I had expected when AMERICAN PSYCHO came up as the first title. (I liked it, but Bateman as a standard bearer was not promising.) Picking that Rick Perlstein book about Goldwater is a stroke of genius -- or I think it will be when I get around to reading it. But the notion of Gen-X, so beloved of '90s magazine writers (they're ruining everything! Wait, they're actually the best!), never gets aired out any more. By some researchers' stats the President would be a Gen-Xer (if you consider that the last members of the Baby Boom generation were born in 1960), but no one ever referred to his campaign as "the Gen-X campaign." You
wouldn't, it would sound silly. It was such a powerful social term, and then it vanished.
So why publish this list now that the term has fallen out of favor somewhat? Well, Generation X writers have had time now to establish themselves. I didn't check to see if every author on there would fall into that demographic*, but to take two mentioned up there, both Junot Diaz and DFW had substantial gaps between first success and next major acclaimed work (11 and 9 years, respectively). If
Details had made this list in 1996, DFW would have made it but Diaz probably wouldn't have on the strength of his first book alone.
A list of Generation Y writers made today would consist largely of prodigies -- or whatever you would call people who had been published at age 28 or under -- and perhaps not be representative of trends shared by the entire group. (And while we're on my generation, we reject the label "Millennials," as if being born in the '80s were akin to joining a cult and we're going to go all comet-eyed any minute, so stop trying to make fetch happen.)
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*I checked the authors mentioned here -- Diaz b. 1968, Franzen b. 1959, Steven Johnson b. 1968, DFW b. 1962, Ellis b. 1964, Perlstein b. 1969. LeBlanc I couldn't confirm but she graduated from undergrad in '86 according to her website so we'll put her b. 1964. Franzen is probably over the line into late-Boomer, but that's a wavery line.
