These days, with a recession on the way, housing prices tanking, the Dow out of control and an unpopular war that won't seem to end, a lot of Americans are feeling uneasy and confused. Recent surveys show a majority think the nation is on what pollsters call "the wrong track."
For Jeff Gordinier, the author of the new book "X Saves the World" and an editor at large for Details magazine, it's actually kind of reassuring.
"I find a strange degree of comfort in it," the writer said serenely at Pasadena's Pie 'n' Burger, a legendary diner near his hometown of San Marino. His Generation X origins, he said, make it hard for him to trust the good times.
"The busts make me feel happy in a way. Like yecch, we knew it would happen -- we knew we'd get suckered again. I knew it would collapse. It's strangely liberating."
The writer looks fairly angst-free: With his tousled blond hair and T-shirt from an old-school seaside tavern in Pescadero, the youthful-seeming 41-year-old could be the percussionist for the Gen-X indie band Pavement.
Gordinier has become the latest laureate of the underdog generation born between 1960 and 1977, whose aimlessness was lamented by a 1990 Time magazine cover story, whose best minds graduated into a recession and spent their post-college years flipping burgers or teaching English in Prague for subsistence wages. He's trying to reinvigorate not only generational identity -- which took a hit when even Pied Pipers such as Douglas Coupland, author of the 1991 book "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture," disavowed the term -- but reignite his cohorts' long-cooled battle with the triumphant, self-obsessed baby boomers.
"This is a manifesto," Gordinier writes, "for a generation that never had much use for manifestoes." Though he sometimes slips into an ironic voice, Gordinier is a wound-up, passionate guy who shares some of his book's good-natured, ranty tone. The book has been praised by Nick Hornby and Neal Pollack.
The new battle, Gordinier makes clear, is with the boomers' kids: The credulous, slavishly obedient Britney worshipers who have, with their larger numbers and burgeoning consumer power, leapfrogged the Xers and begun to reshape the world in their image.
"That's right," he says in his book. "The boomers bred, and their solipsistic progeny have arrived just in time to serve Generation X a second helping of anxiety."
Retail run amok
