Some things you can only see when you aren’t there. As I remember, do I separate the life stage from the time – which one did I enjoy and which one do I miss? But I was also at a different life stage. I thought differently in the 90s, I thought about different things in the 90s – we all did. Travel books and history books sometimes do the same thing for me – they remind me that there are other ways of being. Klosterman does spend a few pages on popular literary figures, but mostly as archetypes as the types of people who were influential during the decade. What’s not here is much talk about movies, or books, or even music beyond its censorship. The ambivalent and slouchy rise of Generation X, Presidential elections and their meaning (or seeming lack of meaning), steroids in baseball, OJ, hanging chads, Waco, the web – a lot of the things you would expect to be here are here. Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.
To be clear, this book isn’t about nonagenarians it’s about the 1990s in America. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. If his other reads are like this one, I’ll put them on my To Read shelf. While a lot of my pop culture interests are Chuck Klosterman-adjacent, this was the first time I’ve read one of his books. (To be honest, I’m always on a 90s kick in music.) Klosterman’s The Nineties was an obvious followup read. That got me on a 90s entertainment kick in music, movies, and other books. Earlier this year I reviewed Cyberville, Stacy Horn’s recounting of starting an online community in 1990s New York.
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