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attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s death, his parents’ divorce, and Southern California kitsch are woven together to form a beautifully meditative and extremely original bildungsroman. “Maps to anywhere” comes to mean (comes to ask): when a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self?

    The subtitle of Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X
is “Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” but the front of the book carries a blurb announcing that it’s a novel. Is the book a collection of stories or a novel, nonfiction or fiction? Graphics, statistics, and mock-sociological definitions compete, as marginalia, with the principal text, which consists of “tales” only looselyconnected by the same cast of characters, but very tightly organized around the inability of any of the characters to feel, really, anything. The mixture of nonfiction and fiction—information crowding out imagination—in
Generation X
embodies the idea that these characters, bombarded by mall culture and mass media, feel that they have “McLives” rather than lives.

    On the top of each page of Brian Fawcett’s
Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow
appear parables—some fantastic, others quasi-journalistic, and all of which are concerned with mass media’s complete usurpation of North American life (Fawcett is Canadian). On the bottom of each page, meanwhile, runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s point: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.

    How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it’s fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there’s almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs reallycan claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

    If no formal distinction exists either way, then the defining question to be asked of memoirs concerns nothing less than the degree of truthfulness they seem to manifest. This is where today’s eager appetite for self-consciousness seems contradictory.

    The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that
none of this ever really happened
—which a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. “Lyric essay” is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it’s apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

    Today the most compelling creative energies seem directed at nonfiction.

    Biography