Wonderfully researched, compellingly written, and often very funny, this is a superb reassessment of an underappreciated decade from a stupendously gifted essayist. Klosterman bookends the decade with the two Bush presidencies, and the fascinating effect of third-party candidates Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. His writing is strongest when he looks at moments through a contemporary lens, including assessments of the impact of Bill Clinton and ardor for the film American Beauty (1999). Klosterman makes compelling connections, such as the rising fear of genetic engineering and the success of Jurassic Park (1993), and explores how much that is ubiquitous now-the internet, political polarization-can be traced back to this underexamined decade. He moves on to question the slacker image, focusing on what this generation actually liked, including the contradictory popularity of both Garth Brooks and Nirvana. In riffing chapters whose mood toggles between jaundiced, jaunty and mournful, Klosterman tries less to uncover the true significance of the decade than to. He begins by exploring how Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) was an odd place for that generation’s name to originate. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. Not if Chuck Klosterman has anything to say about it. Like Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), Klosterman explains what it felt like to live through this decade. From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. In stark contrast to Klosterman’s previous work, Raised in Captivity (2019), a frenetic and inventive fiction collection, his latest is a self-described work of “popular criticism” about the 1990s.
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