Jeff Gordinier, X

Los Angeles ? These days, with a recession on the way, housing prices tanking, the Dow out of control and an unpopular war that won’t end, a lot of Americans are uneasy and confused. Surveys show a majority think the nation is on what pollsters call “the wrong track.”

For Jeff Gordinier, author of the new book “X Saves the World” and an editor at large for Details magazine, it’s actually reassuring.

“I find a strange degree of comfort in it,” Gordinier said from his Los Angeles County hometown of San Marino. His Generation X origins, he said, make it hard for him to trust the good times.

“The busts make me feel happy in a way. Like, yecch, we knew it would happen – we knew we’d get suckered again. I knew it would collapse. It’s strangely liberating.”

Gordinier, 41, has become the latest laureate of the underdog generation born between 1960 and 1977, whose aimlessness was lamented by a 1990 Time magazine cover story, whose best minds graduated into a recession and spent their post-college years flipping burgers or working for subsistence wages.

He’s trying to reinvigorate not only the generation’s identity – which took a hit when Douglas Coupland, author of the 1991 book “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” disavowed the term – but reignite his cohorts’ long-cooled battle with the triumphant, self-obsessed baby boomers.

“This is a manifesto,” Gordinier writes, “for a generation that never had much use for manifestoes.”

The new battle, Gordinier makes clear, is with the boomers’ kids: The slavishly obedient Britney worshippers who have, with their larger numbers and consumer power, leapfrogged the Xers and begun to reshape the world in their image.

“That’s right,” he says in his book. “The boomers bred, and their solipsistic progeny have arrived just in time to serve Generation X a second helping of anxiety.”

Gordinier’s thesis is that for much of the late 1980s and most of the ’90s, the environment – especially bohemian quarters in cities and college towns – helped shape a generation, one that evolved into what he calls “our reticent, dark-horse demographic.” “I grew up among Republicans,” Gordinier said of his childhood in the moneyed suburban haven of San Marino.

“But people like the Sex Pistols blasted my brain in new directions. Going to used bookstores, going to used record stores, going to coffee shops – it’s a cliche, but it’s true – it introduced me to different ways of thinking, different ways of writing. I’m not kidding, I probably would have been a suicidal corporate lawyer by now if I hadn’t been exposed to that stuff.”

But what happens when you grow up with nothing but malls and franchises?

“It’s a completely different mind-set,” he said. “There are kids growing up now who’ve never known anything besides chain stores.”

Change in values

According to Neil Howe, a demographer and historian, generations typically define themselves against the one that came before, “trying to solve the problems of the previous generation.”

As for Gen-X, he has called it “the most under-parented generation in history.”

So it’s no coincidence that each generation looks misguided to members of another.

“If you want to have Xers get their hackles up,” Howe said, “force them to watch ‘High School Musical.’ It’s so happy, so team-oriented, so achieving, their parents care so much about them … “

As Gordinier sees it, everything changed with the arrival of Britney Spears in 1999: The Xers’ groovy, college-radio-and-thrift-store heyday was out; consumer hell was in.

“As soon as Britney broke, a change took place. It was a rebellion against what I’d call rock ‘n’ roll values, in favor of blunt corporate values.”

He cringed as he recalled the early, clean-cut Spears: “Miss Teen USA, an obedient child, more conservative than her predecessors … In a way she’s still obedient – obedient to the tabloids – doing what fame demands.”

He sees a parallel change in hip-hop, from the melodic ingenuity of A Tribe Called Quest and the political courage of NWA to the hedonistic, bling-obsessed world that followed. And a few years later, the “totalitarian kitsch” of “American Idol” crossed the Atlantic and things got even worse.

He even noticed the evolution of the interns at Details magazine:

“A new breed started coming in, and our conversations were all about, ‘How do I become an editor in chief?’ ‘How much do you make?”‘

Think less, react more

“I didn’t intend to write a perfect book,” Gordinier said. “When I was coming up, a lot of the books that inspired me were by Norman Mailer or Henry Miller or Hunter Thompson – books that were these mad gobs of prose.”

Gordinier’s tome is an energetic, often vivid, hastily argued and compulsively overwritten document – one penned, he said, “in a kind of lunatic trance.”

It originated in the sleep-deprived weeks in which its author and his wife (who live in the suburbs north of New York) recovered from the 2006 birth of their son.

When his editor at the magazine called to check in, Gordinier hung up with an assignment to “take on Generation X.”

The ensuing article, “Has Generation X Already Peaked?” became popular and controversial, catching fire online and in the media.

“X Saves the World” which sprang from that article, has the energy of a barroom conversation, along with the digressions, long-windedness and specious reasoning those sessions sometimes include.

“Sometimes,” said Gordinier, “I think authors ought to think less and sort of react.”