The release date for the English version of 'The Nineties' by
Chuck Klosterman is Feb 2022. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
The Nineties: a perceptive and humorous look back at the decade that gave rise to grunge/slacker irony about the sin of trying too hard, amid the biggest transition in American history in terms of social awareness.
Though not as long as it seems, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers occurred a long time ago. Ralph Nader ostensibly decided one presidential election in between, while Ross Perot supposedly decided another. People used to answer their landlines since you never knew who was calling because practically every name and address was in a phone book. By the end, if you didn't know who it was, nobody picked up their new mobile phone, and disclosing someone's address was an act of emotional violence. The human condition underwent a change in the 1990s that we are still trying to fully comprehend. Chuck Klosterman, happily, more than fits the bill.
Beyond isolated incidents such as the Cop Killer, the Titanic, and Zima, there were profound changes in public perception of society, including the emergence of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the contradictory idea that striving too hard was the ultimate source of embarrassment. Without the help of a computer that could recall everything, pop culture surged, creating a strange comfort in never knowing for sure. More people watched any random Seinfeld episode on a Thursday night in the 1990s than the Game of Thrones conclusion. However, no one found it to be significant; if you missed it, you missed it. Whether you defined yourself against it or found a place in it, it was the final age to uphold the notion of a real, hegemonic mainstream before it all started to fall apart.
Chuck Klosterman finds a place in The Nineties in every aspect of it—movies, music, sports, television, politics, shifts in sexuality, race, and class, and the positive and negative aspects of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. A statement such as "The music video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" would make perfect sense in possibly no other book ever written. The multifaceted masterwork that Chuck Klosterman has written is so clever and amusing that it's possible that future historians may label our whole era as Klostermanian.