A few weeks ago, I got together for lunch with Lisa Chamberlain, author of the forthcoming Slackonomics, and Jeff Gordinier, whose X Saves the World had just started showing up in bookstores. Both books deal with the cultural anxiety of “Generation X,” caught between the boomers and the millennials, and are based on articles that the two wrote a few years back—Chamberlain for the New York Observer, Gordinier for Details. It wasn’t always easy: Chamberlain revealed how her book had gone through four different editors at Carroll & Graf and then Da Capo in the turmoil surrounding the Perseus Books Group‘s buyout of Avalon. “There was a good year and a half when I wasn’t doing anything with it,” she admitted. “I thought it was dead.” (And that doesn’t even take into account its brief phase as an economic self-help book, with tips for Xers on staying financially solvent…)
When they did get to writing, the inevitable distractions would emerge, but both agreed that the Internet would prove incredibly helpful, with YouTube in particular offering what Gordinier described as “a library for alternative culture” that made their research much easier. (Chamberlain also observed that, according to Google, more people search for information about “Generation X” than “baby boomers,” but there’s way more information online about boomers.) “I wanted the book to move, to have a speediness to it,” Gordinier says of his writing process. “Imposing word counts on myself for each section was incredibly effective… If there was any seciton that was gumming up the momentum, then it was out. I was relentless with myself.”
“I didn’t want to sound whiny,” Chamberlain says of her handling of the economic crises Generation X has faced; instead, she focuses on how growing up under such conditions has provided her peers with “a unique skill set to deal with big problems.” Gordinier readily agrees. “We’ve seen what fails,” he says of boomers’ often-naive optimism. “Innocence is overrated… Skepticism is a patriotic virtue.” While Chamberlain’s discussion is rooted primarily in economic conditions and Gordinier goes for the cultural history, both highlight the bursts of creativity that emerged out of the insecure circumstances of the ’80s and early ’90s, suggesting that mature Xers can look at today’s problems with a pragmatic eye and actually do something about them.
And a strong dose of subversive humor: “At a time when mass media is so conformist,” Gordinier observes, “Stephen Colbert… allows us to see through the bullshit.” He cites Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, in which he ruthlessly mocked President Bush to his face,as “a major moment in American culture” akin to the release of Nevermind or Pulp Fiction. Linking The Colbert Report to The Onion and South Park, Gordinier says “we should be grateful” for such perspectives.
Gordinier will be arguing his case again tonight in a multi-generational panel tonight at the Half King, squaring off against boomer (and ex-Entertainment Weekly senior writer) Tom Sinclair, and millennially young Kate Torgovnick, whose book about cheerleading competitions, Cheer!, has been sitting on our desk demanding to be read for a while now. The press release promises “a full-contact debate about which generation is the best, and which is the absolute worst.” The fun starts at 7 p.m.