Perspective: Where’s the great millennial novel? A Gen Xer wonders.
By Mark Athitakis April 12 A month or so ago, I was interviewing novelist Bret Easton Ellis when he posed a question: “Where’s the great millennial novel?” As we Gen Xers are wont to do with important matters, we fumbled around with the idea for a bit before shrugging and giving up.
Not long ago, novelist Tony Tulathimutte suggested we’d be misguided to think this stew of socioeconomic dilemmas would lead to an all-encompassing tale of sexting, adulting and AOC. “The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth,” he wrote in the New York Times. But Tulathimutte suggests that millennials haven’t given up on a novelistic urge to explain themselves.
Tenacious ones seem to have recognized that “checking out” is itself a useful theme. Last year Ottessa Moshfegh published a marvelous downhearted novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” that is about exactly that — walking off the job, escaping the worn-out apparatus of work and courtship and friendship and just switching off the lights and sleeping for months, taking grief and ennui and encrusting it in layers of drugs and irony so thick they’d qualify as geologic strata.
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