Trainspotting, Generation X, The Virgin Suicides

I was chatting with my mom yesterday about stores in New York, and she was saying how in the 60s, before it was a bourgeois mall behemoth, Pottery Barn was just a single cool store where you could get nice pottery plates and bowls. All our plates and bowls came from there in my childhood because my parents bought them when they weren’t expensive (and I still have a bunch of them at my place, not very much the worse for wear after a half century). The same was true of Barnes and Noble—before it was an uncool big box chain with frozen lattes and board games and throw pillows, it was an extremely cool non-chain in Manhattan that my parents took a teenage RR to with the promise I could stay as long as I liked and have SEVERAL BOOKS. Whatever I liked.

My parents were extremely free-wheeling with books and I generally got what I wanted, at least from the library if not to own, so I suppose my excitement—for I was very excited—came from being in New York, and perhaps in a store that had more and better books than most I knew. My parents were both born in Brooklyn and lived for many years in Manhattan but that’s not the sort of thing you can hand down. I grew up next to a corn field and I am as much of a bumpkin as anyone in NYC.

The books I chose were Trainspotting by Irine Welsh, Generation X by Douglas Coupland, and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides. Reminding my mom of this list, she commented that those were very good picks—and they were. Don’t be too impressed with 15-year-old Rebecca—I’m pretty sure the last two were recommended to me by reviews in Sassy, although let us mourn the years of the general interest teen magazines that ran beauty, current events, literary, gossip, sexual health, humour, and miscellaneous self-actualization writing all under one cool umbrella. I don’t know where I got the idea to buy Trainspotting—it truly could have been a random pick. I don’t think the film was out by then, though I wound up seeing it both in English and dubbed into French (could someone who is better with accents tell me what they did with the accents in the French version?) and then I saw the play, which doesn’t seem to exactly come up online. All three versions were good and very different—I was impressed the malleability of the story.

Or stories, because the book is a short story collection, free flowing, funny, odd and dark. I had to read it out loud at times to understand the accents but I could do it. I loved the book and immediately tried to read more Irvine Welsh—Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting, and found it deeply disturbing for reasons I can’t recall. Certainly there’s plenty that’s disturbing in the first book but the characters had drawn me in in a way that didn’t happen in the sequel. I was freaked out, stopped reading, and have never read anything else by Welsh since. I don’t know if this is a loss but I don’t hear people mentioning his name a lot. I have reread Trainspotting since and still liked it, but not in a long time.

Recently someone told me that they had no idea that YMCA stood for Young Men’s Christian Association and then a few weeks later a different person said they didn’t know that the term Generation X came from a novel, much less who wrote it. I mean, the original term comes from the Japanese, but Coupland brought it to prominence through his weird and dysphoric novel. I was sad he isn’t getting credit. I feel he doesn’t get credit a lot—the deadpan kitshy anti-capitalist anomie I see in a lot of fiction since 1991 owes him a debt, but few even realize it, let alone acknowledge it. I kept up with Coupland for a long time after Generation X—I read Life after God, and Shampoo Planet and Girlfriend in a Coma and Microserfs and a few others. I was more or less faithful for many years, though the books were of varying quality. People don’t talk about this, but Coupland could write a fun novel to enjoy on the train—they weren’t all big cerebral deals. I stopped at Jpod, which I thought was too mean to be fun, and not good enough to be anything else. I reread Generation X in grad school, and there is definitely enough to say about that novel to study it in a class, though I did stop speaking in that particular class after I garbled my comment on Generation X badly enough that the prof though I was announcing myself as a lesbian somehow. Also once someone tried to introduce me to Douglas Coupland and I hid behind a pole because it was too exciting. He was wearing sweatpants.

I have only recently learned to pronounce Eugenides as you-gen-ih-dees rather than you-gen-ides, a fact which brings me much shame. I have not reread this book in more than 20 years and I am a bit worried about the idea of a group of teen boys narrating a series of young girls destroying themselves. I fear the book might be more problematic than I originally experienced it. I need to go back, but I loved this book so much as I originally found it—formally wonderful and unique, sad and surprising. It’s narrated in the first person plural, like A Rose for Emily and unlike almost everything else ever written. It’s so weird and intimate and yet…not intimate. I loved the complex construction of it, and how it made it feel like you could write just about anything if you were good enough. After this I read Middlesex as soon as it came out and was very excited and then was bored by it, even though I felt it was an admirable book—just not my thing. I have not read anything more than a short story here or there by Eugenides since, though I always mean to (I remain open to reading more by all these authors, to varying degrees).

The books that formed us, man—there are so many, and still more arriving all the time.