Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation- Generation X.
Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working in no future McJobs in the service industry.
Underemployed, overeducated and intensely private and unpredicatable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories: disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, 'Elvis moments' and semi-disposible Swedish furniture.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Generation X is the new lost generation, "the poverty jet set," expatriates within our borders, rebels with so many causes that they are disturbed, displaced, and dispatched. They are marginalized baby boomers who didn't boom and who chose not to yup. Among their ranks are Andy, Claire, and Dag, who have dropped out of society and find themselves in Palm Springs in the Mojave Desert, tending bar or working the Chanel counter at I. Magnin, trading stories at every opportunity in search of some sort of deeper meaning. Their storytelling reveals their innermost secrets and tries to get at the greater Truths and Morals that modern society so utterly lacks. Full of references to the popular lexicon of a dysfunctional culture, Coupland's first book is a scary vision of how the post-apocalyptical life-styles envisioned in science fiction are already with us. You can call this a work of fiction (the publisher categorizes it as "popular culture" and refers to it as "facto-fiction"), but it's a poignant observation of life at the end of the millennium that strikes a chord that will resonate indefinitely. ~--Benjamin Segedin

Kirkus Book Review

Despite its gimmicky large-format design, with its conspicuously clever marginalia, this fictional debut could easily teach Bret Easton Ellis a thing or two. Written from the same generational perspective, Coupland's self-conscious search for ""the spirit of the times"" values genuine wit and the redemptive power of storytelling. The apocalyptic tales of Dagmar Bellinghausen, Claire Baxter, and the narrator, Andy Palmer, all serve as a weird guidebook to their X-ed out generation, a group ""purposefully hiding itself"" from the hyped-up, consumerist, celebrity-obsessed, popcult saturated mainstream. Their pervasive sense of hell brings them together in Palm Springs, a nuclear-age landscape with ""no weather"" and ""no middle class."" Dag, a lapsed Mormon from Canada and a refugee from the ad game, shares bartending duties at Larry's Bar with Andy, a 30-ish student of languages from a big, middle-class family in Portland. Joining them in their desert bungalow retreat is Claire, from a wealthy much-divorced L.A. family. Pool-side, these hip Scheherazades combat boredom with their stories of Texlahoma, the Everyplace in their futuristic fables about intergalactic love, supermarket fallout, and bomb anxiety. There are also wacky little bits about the heiress who meditates into an ethereal death; a man trapped on his library ladder for ten years; and a young fellow who wants to be hit by lightning. In the foreground are this platonic trio's current problems--Dag's pursuit of ""a clean slate with no one to read it""; Claire's effort to shake her obsession with a corporate boy-toy; and Andy's own entropic search for ""less in life."" In the margins, Coupland provides a glossary of mostly funny terms (e.g., ""McJob,"" ""historical underdosing,"" ""Bradyism,"" ""teleparablizing,"" and ""brazilification""); a bunch of occasionally humorous slogans (""Nostalgia is a Weapon,"" ""Bench Press Your I.Q.""); and a handful of pointless, comic-strip frame illustrations. Even though the social commentary is often glib and misdirected, there's lots of welcome rage seething through the cracks in these fractured fictions. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.