South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
A deep dive into ‘The Nineties’
“The Nineties” is subtitled “A Book,” just in case generations after X don’t remember those. And there’s no one more qualified to write it than Chuck Klosterman. Always an astute cultural observer and a fan of deep dives into any subject, Klosterman is focused here on a decade in American life that he says is often portrayed as “a low-risk grunge cartoon.” Or put another way: “The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout … (which) meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”
For Americans born between 1966 and 1981, “The Nineties” is full of “remember that?” moments. There’s nostalgia on every page. Where were you when Al Cowlings drove his buddy O.J. Simpson in a Ford Bronco down the 405 in LA, rarely exceeding 40 miles per hour? And who can forget the experience of wandering the aisles of Blockbuster, which relied on promotional cardboard boxes to lure viewers?
Klosterman’s gift is seizing on those moments that any Gen Xer can readily recall and pulling the strings a bit to put it in some kind of historical perspective. Here’s a great passage about telephones during the decade: “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found.”
It’s tempting for readers to interpret the book as just memories of a more innocent, less instant age. But Klosterman does a good job putting everything in its place.
“Times change, because that’s what times do,” he writes. The book ends with an essay about Sept. 11,
2001. Before the attacks, there were things happening in the world that you heard about, but they were like “New Yorker stories you didn’t need to finish,” writes Klosterman. When terrorists crashed four planes and killed nearly
3,000 people, he writes, “the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.”
— Rob Merrill, Associated Press
Heather Havrilesky’s new memoir,
“Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage,” is a wise, witty, profane, even profound, meditation on her 15-year marriage to a college professor, Bill, who emailed her a fan letter when he read on her blog that she was newly single.
It is also about trying to raise two kids while holding down a full-time job as a TV critic; living in a hipster neighborhood in LA, then moving to a deeply uncool suburb; toying for longer than feels necessary or comfortable with the idea of cheating on her husband; finding out she has breast cancer — but just a tiny bit of it; and finally, realizing that she and Bill are on the greatest adventure of their lives and will almost certainly be on it until one of them dies. In which case, she notes wryly, the marriage will have been a success.
“Every book about marriage is also a book about mortality, since the success of any marriage is defined not by happiness or good fortune but by death,” she writes in the first chapter. “The assignment, after all, is to stay together until you die. Once one spouse perishes, the marriage has succeeded. Death signals victory.”
Havrilesky has written three previous books: a memoir of growing up in the ’70s; an anthology of advice columns; and a collection of essays. Sometimes in this latest book her writing bogs down or turns purple when she tries to link one chapter to the next to propel the story forward. She needn’t have worried. Her voice is so engaging, and her comic timing so impeccable, that she turns the “divine tedium” of her marriage into a rollicking adventure for her readers, too.