The Nineties

It's a bit weird looking back on a decade that you lived through and one that doesn't feel that long ago. Klosterman has organized this book as a series of funny, intelligent and entertaining essays focused on different events, pop culture, and phenomena of the time. One of the press reviews called it “irreverent” and I agree.

Reading the book, I realize how much has changed. The internet was fun but not vital, you had to be at home to get a phone call, and we shared a lot more pop culture experiences back then, for good or for ill, such as Seinfeld, Titanic, Nirvana etc. With social media, we might assume we are connected but everything is broken up into little bits of specialized interest. You also had a higher degree of individuality.

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn't have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”

I enjoyed being reminded of things I hadn't thought of in years. Clarence Thomas, Ross Perot and the 1992 presidential campaign, and the entire millennium changeover scare.

Born the same year as I was, Klosterman had a chapter (Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less) devoted to our generation, generation X, who were the young people during the 90s. We would have been the ones influencing and experiencing the 90s the most at the time but it's hard to notice something when you are in the midst of it.

If there is any weakness in the book it's that I wish he'd been able to go into more of the literature/fiction writing of the time. He mentions a couple of books, neither of which I think were a big deal.

Really good (though very US-centric) trip down the memory lane.

Some of this was excellent. Some of it was tiring. I used to rank Klosterman as one of my favorite authors, but now I just find him exhausting. It must be SO HARD to be SO COOL.

The difference between Klosterman and, say, Malcolm Gladwell, is that Gladwell surprises me with the things he links and the craftiness with which he does so. Klosterman just bludgeons readers over the head with his own opinions and oftentimes the chapters just feel like disjointed rants.