Chuck Klosterman Lived Through This

In his new book, he tries to write about the ’90s as it felt at the time— at least to people like him.

- By David Wallace-Wells. Illustration by Max-o-matic

In his new collection, The Nineties: A Book, the critic Chuck Klosterman works ground-up from culture to build a sort of mood-board history of a decade that floats a little out of focus in the national memory: close enough to feel familiar, far enough to feel weird. It was, he writes, “a remarkably easy time to be alive”—at least for someone like Klosterman, most known for his obsessive meditations on pop culture in books like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and whose “experience across the nineties was comically in line with the media caricature of Generation X.” ¶ There is indeed a lot about Reality Bites and Nirvana and selling out in The Nineties. There is also a lot of other stuff—about the internet, Ross Perot, the Biosphere 2 project that was launched out of environmental anxiety. Throughout, Klosterman tries to resist reducing the period to neat narratives about globalization and neoliberalism, American empire and the rise of the culture wars, or to impose the perspective of the decades to come on the past. But he also thinks the basic cliché of the time is a pretty good shorthand. “The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon,” Klosterman writes in his introduction. “That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect.”

The essayist Gavin Jacobson has called the ’90s an “age without qualities,” which I think describes a pretty common feeling about the decade: that it’s a bit undefined. What’s interesting about it to you?