Convincing a book publisher that you’re the right one to synthesize an entire decade of American history takes a certain brand of institutional authority. The scribes who divvied up the second half of the twentieth century were academic historians (Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies), mainstream political journalists (David Halberstam’s The Fifties), or some combination of both (Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and Reaganland). All of them were serious professionals with serious credentials doing serious work.

So what does it say about the 1990s that the decade’s most notable retrospective so far — The Nineties  — has been written by Chuck Klosterman, the pop-culture critic who once described his experience of binge-watching Saved by the Bell reruns as being in a “parasitic relationship.”

To borrow a stylistic tic from Klosterman, it’s not that big of a deal. But it’s probably bigger than you think.