Blithe Denial: On Devyn Defoe’s “Burnside” and Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X”

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On July 7, three satellites designed to detect wildfires launched into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast north of Santa Barbara. That same day, the son of a Real Housewife of Orange County started an accidental fire in the hills of Ladera Ranch that burned seven acres. (He has since been enrolled in a fire safety course.) On July 8, dry lightning moved across the Sierra Nevada on monsoon wind, and forecasters warned the whole range was primed to catch. It’s the middle of summer, peak California fire season—that uneasy stretch when neighbors exchange numbers, pack getaway bags with doomsday conviction, and then, as the cellphone alarms recede, slip back into blithe denial. 

Denying fire danger is a skill that the young adults of Sacramento native Devyn Defoe’s debut novel, Burnside, have mastered. The novel takes place in “the bowl,” a half-derelict pocket of Northern California. If anyone who lived there cared enough to characterize it, they would call it dystopian. Haze drifts through open windows. Whole districts turn to smoke, but the town’s inhabitants ignore their scratchy throats and continue “acting as if it was normal summer weather.” But maybe acting isn’t the right word. In Defoe’s California, post-fire conditions are normal summer weather. 

Fire has always had a place in California novels. Thirty-five years ago, a casually set conflagration formed the climax of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), which portrayed 1990s America through three friends—Andy, Dag, and Claire—who drop out amid the bungalows of Palm Springs. In Coupland’s novel, fire briefly interrupts isolation and brings people together. In Defoe’s darker tale, catastrophe has become so ordinary that it barely interrupts anything at all. 

The distance between these two novels measures the distance America has traveled in the intervening years. A striking contrast concerns the ways we process information and communicate. In Generation X, the characters draw close to each other through telling stories. In Burnside, the stories have been replaced by rumors. 

Storytelling requires a foundation of trust. Andy, Dag, and Claire distrust consumer culture,

distrust the boomers who handed it to them, distrust the future they inherited. But they trust each other. That allows them to escape together into imaginary spaces. They conjure lush, parallel worlds and embellish their own pasts. Playful mythmaking becomes a form of intimacy, a means of digesting reality without submitting to it, and everyone is in on the joke. 

Burnside asks what happens when that shared understanding collapses. In the thirty-five years separating the novels, new information technologies have altered both how stories travel and the relationships they sustain. Storytelling once implied reciprocal roles: a teller who told, a listener who could respond. In its place now is an endless flow of sensationalized headlines, posts, and updates—information arriving faster than anyone can verify it, from sources no one can place. 

In that flood, stories become rumors. They gather force through repetition rather than accuracy. Rumor keeps Burnside’s atomized world in motion, but it cannot produce the intimacy and recognition that storytelling once did. Inundated with fragments and estranged from one another, its characters are left to believe either everything or nothing they hear. 

The novel orbits the retelling of a single encounter between September, the narrator’s roommate, and a local homeless man named Burnside. While September is sitting at a café, Burnside suddenly grabs her wrist, cutting her with his nails. In her first account to the narrator, there is nothing distinctive about his appearance. His voice is difficult to make out, though he does apologize. The narrator has seen Burnside before. She recalls watching him use a lighter to read a comic book in the dark, accidentally setting the comic book on fire. He lowered his ear toward the flames, listened for a moment, and then gathered his belongings and walked away. September’s response is immediate: “He’s an arsonist too?” 

Like any story passed from person to person, September’s account shifts each time it’s retold. What is initially murky and unknowable takes on intention and detail. An incidental scratch becomes a deliberate, catlike swipe. The accidental fire becomes arson. She grows convinced he’s stalking her. After she ends up with his wallet, the narrator suggests that he may simply want it back. She snaps: “You weren’t there. You don’t know what he was like.” 

Before long, Burnside is blamed for murders, fires, and the ambient instability of life in the bowl. Known to frequent local cafés, he becomes the target of an informal campaign organized through social media stories—unverifiable dispatches designed to spread and expire. The baristas chase him out, only for him to return the next day. Just one proposes a simpler explanation for his persistence: “Could it be…that he just wants to get out of the smoke?” 

While September’s encounter spins off into endless online mutations, Andy, Dag, and Claire are stuck confronting a single, shaky script. They have inherited the tidy post-war promise: work hard, and a life will arrange itself around you—linear, sequential, ending somewhere worth reaching. By the time they get to Palm Springs, they know the promise is false. They are exhausted by office culture and consumer habits that have failed to make them happy, resentful of the world their elders handed off like “skid-marked underwear.” By trading ornate, competitive tales in the desert, they grieve the old story, dream up replacements, and mock the media monoculture still peddling its archaic vision of success. 

Burnside’s characters have no equivalent wreckage to sift through, because they never inherited a single future to lose. What they inherited was apocalyptic weather, pandemic shutdowns, precarious gig work, and algorithmic echo chambers selling rival destinies. In other words, too many stories for any to feel convincing or worth grieving. The narrator recalls spending much of high school convinced that the world had already been swallowed by “a giant yawn.” Instead of inventing alternatives, they spin explanations for lives that were never likely to unfold differently.

September’s boyfriend swears that his two broken arms are all that stand between him and a career as an architect—a “cosmic waste”—despite never having sketched a single building. In Generation X, cosmic waste is embodied by the yuppies who traded their talents for money—people who spend their lives following a myth to its dead end. September’s boyfriend does the reverse: He doesn’t waste his life believing in a myth; he believes the myth that his life is already wasted. 

Rumors in Burnside exist in the present tense. Events and the speculation about them unfold at once, leaving the characters to decipher a world still taking shape—a task made harder by their distance from one another. Characters cross paths constantly without ever really connecting. At a friend’s funeral, separate cliques gather around the same loss without meaningfully intersecting. The narrator admits, “I learned everyone’s jobs and everyone’s names and the names sounded fake and the jobs might have been also.” 

Names hover loosely, failing to correspond to the people and places they describe. Characters drink wine at the “barbershop” and coffee at the “fish shop.” The local bus, known as the “ratbus,” is infested with raccoons. The narrator has no name. September may or may not be named September. Other figures appear simply as “the actor,” “the DJ,” or “the antifascist.” 

Reading Burnside can feel like arriving halfway through an inside joke no one intends to explain. People exist more like profiles than characters, stripped of the context needed to cohere into full selves. They are the residue of stories distilled to the few details that survived their retelling. 

Coupland’s characters are not profiles. They have no audience but each other: no feed, no followers, nobody watching from outside the circle. Inside that circle they say things that land, that require a response. Burnside’s characters live before unseen onlookers, on platforms that reward the most digestible version of a self, and so the stories they tell about themselves become harder to revise or outgrow. One man spends months converting his van into a home and posts instructional videos of the process online. When his parents die suddenly in a car accident and he inherits their actual house, he still spends nights in the van. Even this upheaval cannot fully move him, because a narrative of his life is already in circulation. 

That difference in audience also changes the kind of distance the characters can maintain from their own lives. The ironic aesthetic of Generation X signals that its characters know the game is rigged, and satire of that kind requires a target. Coupland wrote in the last years when it was still possible to imagine that the culture’s problems could be traced to bankers, yuppies, and boomers. 

Defoe’s characters can’t locate an equivalent object. When the same event generates incompatible accounts depending on which feed one follows, irony loses its purchase. The narrator of Burnside doesn’t attempt it. What she practices is closer to dissociation, a flattening of experience. Where Andy moves through Palm Springs with a sly, self-aware wit, she moves through the bowl with a blankness that occasionally tips into the surreal. The world doesn’t feel rigged to her; it just doesn’t feel like much. 

That blankness has a material floor. In Coupland’s California, dropping out still seems possible. Andy and Dag are bartenders; Claire works at a department store. It’s the kind of job Coupland famously named the “McJob”: “a low-pay, low-prestige…no-future job in the service sector.” The work bores them, but it bankrolls a life organized around friendship and leisure. They can quit, find another job, head to the desert, reinvent themselves in Mexico, become nuns, hoteliers, or something stranger. Read from 2026, the faith that a service job could finance such freedom feels almost utopian. 

Defoe’s characters work similarly absurd jobs but to very different effect. September waits tables at a cowgirl-themed “breastaurant,” while the narrator invents inventory numbers for a bookstore’s “audience of invisible people.” As with Coupland’s McJobs, the work is tedious, but it barely pays basic expenses.

Along with the transformation of stories into rumors, the contraction of economic opportunity has foreclosed the choices. Opting out is no longer an option. There is no outside left to enter. One young woman announces she is running away to Portland, only for her stolen car to be found just outside town, coated in dust and facing the wrong direction. Whether she changed her mind or met some darker fate is never revealed. Her attempted escape never develops from rumor into narrative. 

Today, a follower can watch someone online for years, learn the shape of their life, and remain, in every way that once mattered, a stranger. In 1991, “following” usually meant trusting a person enough to go wherever they led. Burnside closes on the modern sense of the word: September’s

group surrounds Burnside, a man they have observed and narrated without knowing. Replaying the novel’s opening scene, she grips the narrator’s wrist, and the narrator trails her home because no other path seems possible. 

Generation X ends with Andy leaving for San Felipe to join Dag and Claire in a half-imagined hotel venture, following the two people he trusts most toward a future none of them can fully articulate. On the drive, he and a group of strangers pull off the highway to watch what looks like a mushroom cloud but turns out to be farmers burning stubble. The moment is “restful” and “unifying,” a flash of wonder that makes people smile at one another before they move on. 

Back then, fire still had the power to stop strangers in their tracks and turn them toward one another, to make even a false alarm an occasion. Today, it’s hard to say which fantasy is quainter: aimless thirty-somethings fleeing to Baja, or a driver braking to admire farm-field smoke.