Do I just like reading about the staples of my (elder Millennial) childhood? Maybe – I do really miss Hollywood Video. How can you expect to capture a whole decade in a few hundred pages? Especially as Klosterman’s central argument is that it was during the 90s when time, memory, and our understanding of world events collapsed into something of a sloppily mediated metanarrative.

And yeah, he gets a little lost in the swirl of his own ideas here and there, but what honest pontificating 90s slacker doesn’t? It’s all the more forgivable, because, really, he does a pretty darn good job at an impossible task. And yes, that’s the generic, generalized ‘we’ – were, he asks, the 90s the last era of American monoculture? Klosterman is most insightful when he’s going back to view things through the eyes of people as they lived through it – the Seinfeld finale, the siege in Waco, The Real World, OJ’s white Bronco, Nirvana’s earth-shaking pep rally - this is how it felt as it happened. What’s great about this book is how Klosterman surveys the years past to understand how we understood the world at the time. Fortunately, he’s mostly uninterested in retrospective reevaluation and generally steers clear of ‘you couldn’t do that today!’ finger wagging, though he has his moments.

Klosterman would like to set the record straight. Maybe it’s no surprise that a guy born smack in the middle of the Gen X years, whose salad days align pretty much exactly within the confines of 90s, is a little persnickety at the swell of nostalgia for the decade.

Chuck klosterman the nineties review