The Top Six Trends from The Nineties, According to Gen X

Revelations from Chuck Klosterman, slacker-in-chief

I don’t remember much from Chuck Klostermann’s best-selling essay collection from 2003, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs other than a vague feeling of rage and jealousy that his scattershot pieces about culture had become a sensation in the literary world. The two-dimensional thudding of his prose grated my sensibilities and the evasive economy of his style always seemed to end not with a cliffhanger but a cliff dive where conclusions fall without, necesssarily, concluding things. I respected Klosterman from afar, but swore not to read anything else from him.

This year, Klosterman returned under the Christmas tree: remembering my preoccupation with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in college, my mom gave me his latest essay collection: The Nineties (2022). I experienced the collection with the same level of outrage, but a more mature appreciation for what Kolsterman was trying to do. Just like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, the soul of The Nineties still shines - despite Klosterman’s best efforts.

After rereading the final page three times, I closed the book, put my head back, and thought of Klosterman through a meme:

But Klosterman, just like last time, does, in fact, get away with it.

Prose vs. Product

The Nineties is described by the bookjacket as an exploration of:

the last era that held to the idea of an objective hegemonic mainstream before everything began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.

The clarity of this thesis is never once reached by Klosterman. But this confusion is inevitable, because The Nineties is ostentatiously ambitious. In looking across the decade that defined him, Klosterman decides to throw all the themes he can think of in a blender. The resulting smoothies are of various quality, stability, and length. When he covers a subject that interests him, Klosterman’s sentences become a military march of minutia that unerringly fatigue the reader and often stifle the electricity of the collection. When he covers something that clearly doesn’t interest him, readers are treated to a Wikipedia-style entry drained of all personality. These pieces include the crisp two-page summary of American’s relationship with Boris Yeltsin or an essay attempting with unnecessary acrobatics to make a point assembled from celebrity trivia, golf stories, and The Blair Witch Project, that reads as Klosterman’s unfiltered, unrelated, unedited memories.

Just like the TV culture that informs it, The Nineties feels like flipping through channels and not knowing what you’ll find. If you’re closely reading, a brief ad spot for the collection’s theme will briefly appear before dissolving into another history lesson numbed by Klosterman’s sports journalism style. What kept me marching to the end of the collection was the unfailing promise that, in traveling enough trivia and subjective declarations about the nineties, there was always another encounter with one of Klosterman’s annoyingly sharp sentence-level revelations. The structure of these thoughts are profound in their sheer pithiness. Klosterman throws these treasures of truth out from the page like bread from a bench without ever expanding on what he’s trying to actually say. The economy of style that is his enemy is also a fascinating gift when it comes to leaving sentences that linger in the blunt beauty of their language.

Still, The Nineties becomes a military march because of the staccato of Klosterman’s newspaperman voice. The sublime is often subsumed by the shadows of the factoids and objects he confuses as expanding his greater meaning rather than diminishing it. The scale of the contents here is what keeps The Nineties from being a definitive volume on the new nostalgia for this decade, because the mix keeps Klosterman’s points soluble. As the clearly bewildered copywriter of the book jacket concludes, the collection recounts:

the films, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the ying/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan.

Still, it’s a worthy effort. Even if every essay writhes between historical record and culture critique and clutches the pearls of their purpose close, The Nineties is a valiant attempt at a narrative for the last and greatest mass media decade - even when Klosterman pulls the teeth from each piece without showing the dental records to the reader.

I would categorize the nineties - according to Klosterman - as sectioned into six different themes:

1. Gen X: The Least Annoying Generation?

2. The 1990s: Golden Age of the Subculture

3. Commercialism vs. Capitalism

4. Smells Like Teen Slackers: Gen X, Nirvana, and What Came After

5. TV: The Original Matrix

6. The Dangers of Irony

Each week, Litverse will cover these themes with Klosterman in the driver’s seat and Litverse’s analysis in the passenger’s seat, gently, arrogantly correcting the nostalgia when it takes a wrong turn. Ultimately, The Nineties is a good book for anyone who wants to remember a pre-millennium culture, reflect on the way media shapes memories, and just how great a time it actually was. Especially if you read it with the extra oily context provided here at Litverse.