Generation X is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s—a generation known vaguely up to then as twentysomething.

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs—low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry. They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges—landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, Elvis moments, and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

Newcomer Coupland sheds light on an often overlooked segment of the population: ``Generation X,'' the post-baby boomers who must endure ``legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)'' and who indulge in ``knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course . . . ).'' These are just two of the many terse, bitterly on-target observations and cartoons that season the margins of the text. The plot frames a loose Decameron -style collection of ``bedtime stories'' told by three friends, Dag, Andy and Claire, who have fled society for the relative tranquility of Palm Springs. They fantasize about nuclear Armageddon and the mythical but drab Texlahoma, located on an asteroid, where it is forever 1974. The true stories they relate are no less strange: Dag tells a particularly haunting tale about a Japanese businessman whose most prized possession, tragically, is a photo of Marilyn Monroe flashing. These stories, alternatively touching and hilarious, reveal the pain beneath the kitschy veneer of 1940s mementos and taxidermied chickens. (Mar.)

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