Teenage wasteland: Coming-of-age novels in the 1980s and 1990s

In Generation Ecch!, a popular satire of contemporary youth culture, Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman excerpt the promotional blurbs from several recent coming-of-age novels to uncover an intriguing trend. One critic describes Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) as a “Catcher in the Rye for the M. B. A. set.” Another labels Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) “an updated Catcher in the Rye.” Cosmopolitan’s book editor proves such a Catcher fan that she compares not one but two Douglas Coupland novels to that classic. “Having called Coupland’s first book [Generation X (1991)] a Catcher in the Rye for our times,” she writes of his second, Shampoo Planet (1993), “i repeat myself (97)”. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.