Ah, the 1990s, brought to you by Nirvana, Generation X, the Gulf War, Seinfeld, Fox News, Pulp Fiction and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In The Nineties, de facto cultural historian and affable know-it-all Chuck Klosterman dissects the decade's most iconic people, events and artifacts, using his customary high-energy prose, sidelong point of view and delight in the preposterous.
Each chapter in The Nineties reads like a work of long-form reporting, as in the exploration of Ross Perot's possibly history-altering role in the 1992 presidential election and the examination of technology in the '90s, when the "concept of buying a new phone every other year would have seemed as crazy as installing a new toilet every other Thanksgiving." A wily and pitiless social critic operating from a position of rapt astonishment, Klosterman takes every opportunity to show how one-time cultural high-water marks have been reappraised: "Modern people," Klosterman writes, "hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century."
Born in 1972, Klosterman (Raised in Captivity) reached the age of majority at the start of a decade in which "the worst thing you could be was a sellout.... Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible." Since it's no longer the '90s, Klosterman will presumably find a way to live with himself should his boffo essay collection become deservedly popular. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer