At the start of Nirvana's 1991 song “Territorial Pissings,” bassist Krist Novoselic howls out the refrain of “Get Together” – a 1960s anthem of love and understanding – with an irreverence that makes clear the grunge band's contempt for hippy paeans. The territory that Nirvana mark here is what Ana Sobral would describe as generational, the poster boys of Generation X defining themselves against baby boomer idealism. Opting Out: Deviance and Generational Identities in American Post-war Cult Fiction traces this group identity formation in three novels from each period. Ranging from classics like On the Road to works such as Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Sobral's evenness of approach boldly asserts a lineage of cult fiction stretching over the latter half of the twentieth century. To some extent this creates an arborescent narrative whereby each text becomes a development upon the last, which the study's chronological structure (beginning with Kerouac, it ends with Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club) only reinforces. Sobral is nevertheless attentive to ruptures between novels: indeed, it is the “heated debate” (6) arising from the X-ers' rejection of the boomer ethos that she seeks to explore.

Central to Sobral's investigation is the notion of deviance. Part One follows the constructivist approach to deviance as socially contingent, so that it is the “reaction to [deviant] behaviour in a given social context [that] determines its positive or negative qualities” (39). Negative reaction provides the frisson of cult literature, as the “heroes” of these texts are those whose transgressions earn society's censure, thus encouraging them to “opt out” of prevailing mores. Empathizing with such characters is the driving force of cult readership, which in Sobral's view – to draw in the last term of her interpretative triad – propagates a distinct generational identity. Taking cues from Dean Moriarty or Tyler Durden signals the reader's affinity with a horizontal community of other readers who, crucially, are in “confrontation with members of older generations” (29). For Sobral this fringe of tuned-in young people is the bleeding edge of cultural innovation and, if circumstances are right, tangible social change. The force with which she links deviance, generation, and cult here can feel hermetic, but Part One's tightness still establishes a firm theoretical base for her subsequent readings.

Parts Two and Three are exactingly similar in their layout and methodology. Each chapter focusses on a single book and begins by contextualizing it in its historical moment: Sobral places Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for example, alongside the anti-psychiatry movement of the early 1960s. She then proceeds to offer close textual analyses before ending with an account of each novel's “Critical Reception and Impact,” effectively bookending her chapters with historicist perspectives. This allows Sobral to flesh out her examination of fiction's impact on “processes of social and cultural change” (63), while her close readings, if a little with the grain, successfully avoid being overwhelmed by such sociological framing. A recurring topic in these readings is the macho flavour of deviance – all six novels are, after all, written by males and largely concern men. The postfeminist X-ers come out best here, but as Sobral's reading of Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero implies, if Generation X's cult fiction allowed women to opt out too, by this point youth revolt had become self-destructive and always-already compromised. Emancipatory deviance in Opting Out is the province not only of the boomers alone, then, but of male boomers at that.

The acuity with which Sobral unpicks deviance in each novel is unfortunately lacking when it comes to what she considers “the true American spirit” (139) animating cult fiction. Her willingness to invoke an “American national character” (52), defined by familiar tropes of self-reliance and rugged individualism, creates a peculiar feedback loop whereby each novel's rebellious sentiment ultimately becomes a yearning to renew core (and hence, obliquely, conservative) national values. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, for instance, “actually recovers and reinforces some of the most important American myths” (138). Even Generation X, for whom “the power of identification … with the founding myths seems to be lost” (255), still “convey a sense of urgency [at how] the core values of America … have been seriously undermined” (256). This would be less of a problem if Sobral's thesis did not hinge on arguing that these books are valuable for advocating alternative lifestyles and sociocultural change. As it is, by relating their deviance back to a perennially renewed “American project” (35), she risks neutering each novel's subversive energy in the very process of promoting it.

Despite this, Opting Out remains an informed analysis of how cult fiction has helped forge the US's two major postwar generations. Sobral's invocation of “American spirit” may wobble under scrutiny, but her informed thematic readings will be useful for students and accessible to more general fans of the cult books that this study interrogates.