Among the seemingly endless flood of cookie cutter Gen-X memoirs churned out over the past several years, precious few have stood out from the crowd. Dan Kennedy's Loser Goes First is not one of those books. Instead, it is a meandering mish-mash of pithy commentary and self-depreciating anecdotes. The episodic nature of the book seems to indicate it may have started as a series of failed essays before turning into a mundane and ultimately unsatisfying memoir.

The theme pushing the reader from one episode to the next is Kennedy's lack of direction and persistent penchant for failure, oftentimes due to nothing more than bad timing on his part. Early on in the book, he gets a job at a coffee stand in the one neighborhood in Seattle where no one drinks coffee, then leaves with his guitar in hand for Austin just as the grunge scene is taking off.

While Kennedy's writing reads easily and he has a good sense of detail, it is his voice that ultimately causes the book to fall flat. Where humor is intended, the writer almost always comes off as overly self-effacing or sometimes downright smarmy. For a book that is intended to be comic, it just isn't very funny.

The more introspective sections are where Kennedy really comes apart though. Part of the problem is, he isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before. Between Douglas Coupland's Generation X twelve years ago and Dave Egger's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius there's very little to say about the ennui and aimlessness of today's 30-somethings that's fresh or original. Kennedy's musings on life, work, love, and happiness come across as pithy and hackneyed in the wake of what's essentially become conventional wisdom about Gen-Xers. The idea of a directionless narrator stumbling through life without a goal that worked so well for Coupland and Eggers falls flat under the microscope of a post-millennium perspective.

Ultimately, there's little enjoyment for the reader to be derived from this sporadic look at Dan Kennedy's first thirty-three years. Maybe by the time he's fifty, he'll actually have something new to say.