Generation Jones and Contemporary US Fiction

1. The Summer of 1979

If Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) had a soundtrack, it would include punk and new wave pioneers like Patti Smith, as well as popular rock groups like Bachman-Turner Overdrive. That’s what’s playing in the background during their college years, when the main characters, Patty and Walter Berglund, and their friend Richard meet. Hanging out during the summer of 1979, they talk about Three Mile Island and the Iranian Revolution, type on an IBM Selectric, go to the opening of Days of Heaven, and watch Fantasy Island on TV.

As with most novels, these details bolster the realism of the book, but they also define a distinctive generational sensibility. Patty was born in 1958, Walter and Richard a year or two before that (Freedom 535). They would typically be considered Baby Boomers yet have little in common with the Woodstock generation. They represent the generation after those who came of age in the sixties, but before Generation X, one that the cultural commentator and marketing consultant Jonathan Pontell has named “Generation Jones.”

The Baby Boom is typically defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, according with the spike in births after World War II. (Of course, there is some debate about dates; the popular generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (1992), recalibrate the years to include 1943-1960, followed by Generation X, born from 1961 to 1981.) In contrast, Pontell argues that the conventional segment covers too long a span: shared characteristics rather than demographic numbers create a generation, and the latter portion of those in the postwar boom have very different social and cultural moorings from the earlier contingent. Thus, he distinguishes those born from 1954 to 1965, like President Barack Obama (b. 1961) and also Franzen (b. 1959), as well as his characters, from Boomers proper, born from 1942 to 1953, declaring that, “We fill the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ and ‘Just Say No,’ and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged.”¹ He starts with 1942 because news reports recognized a new generation by the mid-1960s, along with a 1967 Time magazine cover declaring those “Twenty-five and Under” its “Man of the Year.”² Since Vietnam loomed as a major formative event of that group, Pontell pinpoints 1954 as the beginning of Jones because, among other things, it marked the first birth year of males who would not be drafted to serve there. Pontell’s distinction thus separates those who turned 21 from 1963 to 1974, as the 1960s generation, from those who turned 21 from 1975 to 1986, in effect the long 1970s generation.³ While the latter is usually folded into the Boomers in the US, in Britain it is recognized as the Punk Generation, as opposed to the Lucky Generation who came of age in the 1960s.

One reason Pontell calls it “Jones” is its relative anonymity, particularly compared to the sixties generation, who seem to get all the attention. Another is that it is characterized by a yearning (as in “jonesing”), a feeling that it missed out, arriving after the legendary flourishing of the 1960s (think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” [1980]). A third reason is its irony, more tongue-in-cheek than the Boomers (think Jerry Seinfeld, b. 1954), whose mode has tended more toward parody or outrage. Other commentators have noted a lost generation between the Boomers and X, sometimes with slightly different dates, but an “avalanche of attitudinal and behavioral data,” in Pontell’s words, corroborates this useful shorthand. Moreover, Generation Jones encompasses more than 50 million Americans, so it is pivotal, even if less immediately visible than the Boomers proper, who number 26 million in Pontell’s count. Its sheer size gives it traction as a marketing category; an IBM Global Business Services report, “Meeting the Demands of the Smarter Consumer,” tags it as a more “instrumentalized” generation than the Boomers. It also has traction as a political demographic, defining the generation that rose to...