SOURCE: A review of Life after God, in The New Criterion, Vol. XII, No. 8, April, 1994, pp. 79-80.

In the following negative review of Life after God, Bloom states that Coupland "sees the telling detail and hears the revealing bit of dialogue, but he never goes behind or beyond them."

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) established Douglas Coupland as the leading bard of the young and the listless. It was a best seller, read by any twentysomething who is, or hopes to be, culturally in-the-loop. Coupland's new collection of short stories and sketches, Life After God, examines the spiritual life of the X-ers, or rather, their lack of spiritual life.

Twentysomethings bristle at the very notion of generational identity. They protest (too much) when they are stereotyped as "cynical," "jaded," or "slack." As strident individualists, one and all, they reply that the "Generation X" phenomenon is a...