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FROM THE SHELF
MARCH 2�9, 2022
CHECKING OUT THE
WORLD OF BOOKS
Explore a ‘misunderstood’ decade in
‘The Nineties’ by Chuck Klosterman
By Chris Barsanti
Star Tribune
I
The Penguin Press
n Richard Linklater’s movie “Dazed
and Confused,” a character defi nes
their “Every Other Decade Theory”:
“The Fifties were boring. The Sixties
rocked. The Seventies, my God, they
obviously suck. So maybe the Eighties
will be, like, radical.” When that movie
opened in 1993, the twenty-something
audiences it targeted laughed know-
ingly: Obviously the Seventies had been
cooler than the Eighties. None could
conceive of thinking seriously about the
decade they were living through, much
less writing a book about it.
Chuck Klosterman’s “The Nineties”
wrestles in an entertaining and fi tfully
insightful way with a decade few of us
feel like we understand. As the writer of
an incisively snarky string of books and
articles on our tangled, often-baffl ing
connection to the American pop cul-
ture zeitgeist, Klosterman seems ide-
ally suited to the task. Who better than
the guy who wrote an entire essay on
a character from echt-Nineties series
“Saved by the Bell” (“Being Zack Mor-
ris”) and names some of his chapters
for iconic indie-rock anthems of slack
(“Fighting the Battle of Who Could
Care Less”)?
From the start, Klosterman tries to
look past the “grunge cartoon” take
on the decade. This is welcome, given
how often cultural chroniclers reduce
periods to worn cliches. He knows that
just muddling together Kurt Cobain, the
O.J. Simpson trial, Biosphere 2, Boris
Yeltsin, Bush v. Gore, Timothy McVeigh,
“Friends” and the “Clear Craze” (Crys-
tal Pepsi, Zima) produces no greater
understanding. This is partially due to
Klosterman’s somewhat self-satirizing
Gen-X suspicion of certainties. He is
most discerning when parsing the tor-
tured relationship his generation had in
the Nineties to authenticity and popu-
larity: Alanis Morissette “was successful
because of her honesty, but anyone that
successful had to be lying.”
In riffi ng chapters whose mood
toggles between jaundiced, jaunty
and mournful, Klosterman tries less to
uncover the true signifi cance of the
decade than to communicate how it
was to experience. In turn, that leads
t
sco oo u k n s on a ly)
i
d
0% d b ing
to explaining how diff erent moments
were viewed through or even created by
the period’s increasingly media-satu-
rated environment. His passage on the
Columbine massacre is devastating in
showing how a false narrative of misfi ts-
versus-popular kids derived from cheap
fi ctional high school tropes seemed
more soothing than the killings’ true lack
of meaning: “Television had become the
way to understand everything.”
Though waggish, smart and packed
with ephemera on everything from
Baudrillard’s infl uence on “The Matrix”
to the “calculated redness” of Billy
Ray Cyrus’ neck, “The Nineties” keeps
turning in a downbeat direction. That
cartoonishly banal period between the
fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the
World Trade Center can look to some
today like the calm before the storm.
Klosterman isn’t trading in nostal-
gia for the days of “Yo! MTV Raps” and
dial-up modems but he appreciates the
momentousness of what the new mil-
lennium wrought: “The illusion that got
shattered was the possibility of living an
autonomous life, separate from the lives
of others.”
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