Front Matter
Earlier this week I was interviewing a novelist, a gen-Xer like myself, who posed a question neither of us had a good answer for: Where’s the Great Millennial Novel?*
Of course, debates about the Great [Anything] Novel are a sucker’s game to start with. And they’re even more absurd today, now that an ever-decreasing proportion of Americans read books and those who do rarely arrive at a consensus. As a (presumably Millennial) college-newspaper columnist wrote a couple of years ago in a memorable throw-down about all this GAN talk: “Nothing tells us how full of shit we are more often than our greatest novels. What the fuck even is the American experience?” Lionel Trilling it ain’t, but you get the point.
Still, the question stuck in my mind, because forget about greatness or even above-averageness---are there many notable, ambitious Millennial novelists who even have established literary careers? (You’ll note my weasel-words, “notable” and “ambitious,” which is me trying not to say “literary fiction” but generally looking there.) If we accept Pew’s definition of a Millennial as one born after 1980, the eldest members of that generation will turn 40 next year, not-unreasonable age for, er, notable, ambitious authors to be settling into their careers---especially in a generation where MFA programs have exploded, serving hordes of aspiring writers, many if not most of them ambitious twentysomethings.
After the interview I ran through a list of writers that seemed like possible candidates, and most were late Xers at best. Zadie Smith? Nope. Jesmyn Ward? Uh-uh. Garth Risk Hallberg, Rachel Kushner? Sorry. Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner? On the bubble. Here’s are a few authors who might qualify: Valeria Luiselli, Anthony Marra, Angela Flournoy, Nathaniel Rich. Your sense of their status and accomplishment may vary, but on this we can agree: None are household names, and little of what they’ve written would fit the mold of “generational spokesperson” that’s the reason why this author I interviewed brought it up in the first place.
Novelist Tony Tulathimutte argued why that’s the case in a New York Times op-ed in 2015: “The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality,” he writes. If writing a novel meant aspiring to voice-of-a-generation status, Tulathimutte would walk off the job, as would much of his cohort. I could perhaps make a case that Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the Great Millennial Novel because it is about exactly that---walking off the job, denying the worn-out structures of work and courtship and friendship and just checking out, taking your grief and covering it in layers of drugs and irony so thick they’d qualify as geologic strata. I’m not sure the greatness is quite there yet, though I do root for Moshfegh like I do few other working fiction writers.
Still, my age-related googling felt gross and doxxy pretty quick, and perhaps a little besides the point. Fun fact: If you type “[author name] age” into Google, it will autocorrect “age” to “agent.” If I understand the algorithms right, people aren’t as excited about where an author maps generationally than whether they map at all. In a time of diminishing attention spans, every novelist needs any foothold for visibility they can get, and that’s what people are searching for---how can I be noticed and heard? Millennials have borne that question more than any other; give them a few years, and I suspect they’ll find a way of writing about that. They can only hope there are still enough Boomers and Xers around to read and appreciate it.
*I’m not being coy or protective by not naming the author; just respectful of the publication that assigned the profile to me, so as not diminish from that piece before it appears. In any event, you’ve likely at least heard of him, probably read one his novels, and seen a critically acclaimed film version of one of his novels. He asked the question seriously.
What I’m Reading
Rachel Hadas delivers an appreciation of Epictetus’ Encheiridion---or as I experienced it as a moody 20something would-be Stoic, The Manual. Natalie Wolchover explores the question of whether physicists, after drilling deep into the atom to understand the nature of matter, may be going about this all the wrong way. Elizabeth George writes gorgeously about A Night With Lou Reed, a 1983 concert film that crystallizes Reed’s rage and druggy past before her eyes as an enchanted teenager. I will read any article defending federal arts funding, even if (especially if!) it runs in the National Review, but Brian T. Allen’s is sorry as such defenses go, effectively arguing that the NEA is worth keeping because it’s so underfunded and toothless now that it hardly bears attention. The piece also contains this howler, after proposing that the NEA, NEH, etc., operate under the aegis of the Department of Education: “Betsy DeVos, a good Midwesterner and arts philanthropist, would deliver a bracing lesson on what’s substance, what’s sparkle, and what’s pablum.” Hasn’t the poor NEA suffered enough since Piss Christ?
End Notes
The kids…are coming up…from behind…
Thanks for reading. Send the manuscript of your Fyre Festival novel and other correspondence to mathitak@gmail.com. I’m on Twitter. Buy my book. Headshot illustration by Pablo Lobato.