In David Lynch’s Lost Highway, LA jazz musician Fred Madison and his wife Renee are haunted by malevolent forces they cannot see or name. A mysterious videotape appears on their doorstep with camcorder footage showing them sleeping in their beds, filmed by an unknown stalker. At one point an investigating officer from the Los Angeles Police Department asks Fred why he doesn’t own a camcorder — this being the ’90s — and he answers: “I like to remember things my own way . . . not necessarily the way they happened.”

Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book takes Fred’s oblique aphorism as its mantra: Klosterman wants to remember the ’90s his own way, not necessarily the way they happened. Klosterman discloses this in the book’s opening pages: “There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What’s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.” It’s a potentially interesting conceit, but by the book’s final chapters it functions to protect the most clichéd representations of the ’90s and dismiss critics who view it as a politically troubling decade.

A reader might not pick up on this sleight of hand right away. Klosterman spends most of the book excavating typical ’90s problems and artifacts: Generation X being both widely represented and misunderstood as the “slacker generation,” the video rental store as ground zero for indie film cinephilia, the mediatization of the Gulf War by twenty-four-hour cable news, and yet another exegesis on the cosmic importance of Kurt Cobain and Nevermind. To be fair to Klosterman, I did find some of this fun to read. When he described Seinfeld and Friends as part of “an authoritarian night of entertainment NBC branded as ‘Must See TV’” I laughed out loud. The account of Garth Brooks’s inexplicable popularity, which Brooks single-handedly destroyed with his alt-rock persona “Chris Gaines,” is also a highlight.