There Is No Great Millennial Novel

On the candidates and their shortcomings

Non Grata contributing writer Owen Yingling is quickly becoming one of the finest contemporary literary critics. In this essay he puts forth what the Great Millennial Novel should be and examines why the usual suspects fall short. It is a piece worth returning to time and time again.

Every age gets the art it deserves, and every age must accept the art it gets…To say that this or that writer is a fraud may be legitimate literary criticism: to arraign a generation of writers is merely bad sociology.’

— T.S. Eliot

Outside the monographs of the academic historian—which, of course, are never read—every generation is reduced to three or four pictures that fade as time flees, until by the work of the world’s immanent compression algorithm, the most disparate groups of people are combined into an “age” or “period.”

Properly “capturing” a generation or particular period in time is then a quixotic and, naturally, exclusionary task.

It’s uncontroversial to say that The Great Gatsby was a generational novel but this is not because Fitzgerald captures what it was like to live in the 1920s for many different sorts of people. It is because his genius seems to peel back everything incidental and disposable and properly judge the entire age. The same could be said of the best novels by Updike, Wharton, Cheever, etc. This is what we should want from a “Great Millennial Novel.” We have not yet been satisfied.

Why not? Is it too early to estimate the lasting literary contribution of Millennial writers to this pursuit? I don’t think so. Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t think so.¹ The oldest millennials are in their forties. Mailer was famous at twenty-five. Fitzgerald at twenty-three. Zadie Smith at twenty-five. Even Wallace, our last true literary celebrity, broke out in his mid-twenties. By their early thirties—certainly in the case of Mailer, Fitzgerald, and Wallace—they’d written generational works.

Before turning towards much-lauded millennial candidates, is there perhaps some systemic issue at play?

In his final book,Talents and Technicians, which the Washington Post called “a nasty little piece of work,” critic John Aldridge was happy to play the old codger and lambast the trendiest writers of the 1980s: Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and the minimalists for a nihilistic shallowness. Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis for substituting a muddled depiction of wealthy hedonism for a full-throated critique of the age.

Aldridge is cranky, overly conservative, and too certain of his conclusions. But his derisive attitude towards the contemporary fiction of the 1970s and 1980s sheds much-needed light on how the current state of literature will appear to posterity.²

The essential problem Aldridge raises is simple: there is a tension between being a great novelist and the sort of writer who would be called “the voice of a generation.” A tension between being the writer who can adequately describe the facts of being alive at a particular time in a way that is compelling to immediate readers, and being the writer capable of vivisection, the sort of writer capable of reading entrails and telling us what we do not already know about the age, or know but cannot articulate. It is not exactly a lack of talent: more a lack of nerve. Either too much love for the time you’re writing about—often a consequence of literary success, fame, or nostalgia—or a bitter sense that the period is ultimately unintelligible. You can tell Aldridge yearns for the days of Mailer and Roth as he blames MFAs, the academization of both criticism and fiction-writing, and all those other explanations you’ve been hearing about in bits and pieces for the last thirty years. But what he claims is still true. Many contemporary novels have succeeded in their verisimilitude, giving readers the sense of being trapped in the internet, making them pine for the days that preceded it. Yet none have made the reader aware of something fundamentally new. In other words, as Algridge argues, many lauded writers can reflect contemporary reality, but do not actually give us “a reality perceived, understood, and imaginatively transformed by an extraordinary mind.” They tie themselves too tightly to the times for the sake of contemporary success. This goes beyond book sales, as many of the writers he discusses did not sell well, to intangibles like MFA clout or status among the high-brow New York literati.

These writers produce accurate work but “treat personal life as if it were a phenomenon existing totally apart from society and without connotations that would give it meaningful relevance to a general human condition or dilemma—in the sense, for example, that Heller’s Yossarian or Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim become representative both of human types and of problems shared by an entire generation.” A generational novel should be able to lay out these problems and posit a resolution of some sort through the writer’s genius. This is what we would like to read.

For any writer born after the 1960s, the trade-off between contemporary “success” and lasting endurance has posed a grave challenge to so-called generational writers. Aldridge’s book was written in 1992. Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis (though not necessarily for his literary merit), Louise Erdrich, and Mary Robinson have escaped the great literary oblivion for now (with a caveat for the minimalists who have benefitted from significant taxpayer funds and the wasted careers of their mentees). In spite of their prizes, residencies, and grants, who will be reading David Leavitt, T. C. Boyle, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, or even poor Frederick Barthelme (overshadowed by his brother) in another thirty years? Am I wrong to think no one? To suggest that these writers have tied themselves too tightly to their times and sacrificed immortality for a bevy of prestige in their own little world of tenure, “Genius” grants, and Pulitzer nominations?

They were not wrong, per se, to do so. The tragedy of millennial writers is that many prostituted themselves for even less: status in irrelevant scenes, dead in a year, always ending in ridicule and a worthless heap of words. At least they built institutions and seduced college kids (not always a metaphor, unfortunately) into believing that the purpose of their lives was to get an MFA. In a sense they succeeded. Good for them.

But the contemporary writers that followed don’t even have that to count on. They have fallen back into Aldridge’s trap. We can pathologize and make excuses: the world is changing too quickly, we’re too disconnected from one another, there is no meaning to be found anywhere. If I was a millennial writer, that’s what I would do. I’d throw my hands up in the air. Who do you think I am, Flaubert? I publish in a small press. I teach college kids. I do coke with other thirty-five year-olds at parties.

In any case, while Aldridge’s diagnosis—that for various reasons writers would rather describe than vivesect—explains why so many of the once-lauded millennial writers and their novels have not had literary staying power, some of them certainly have. There are candidates. Sally Rooney is “the first great millennial novelist.” Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens “[t]he first great millennial novel.” Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation “might just answer the cry for a so-called millennial novel.”³ Will these books last? I’m not sure.

Grading on a curve, the two books that come closest to being the “Great Millennial Novel”—by judging the period in a convincing way and not just describing it—are Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Tao Lin’s Taipei. This does not bode well for millennials. These two novels create such an atmosphere of nausea that I could not read twenty straight pages of either without starting to feel sick. Though formally different, these books converge on a judgement of sorts: the millennial subject was failed by childish parents and left to rot in a hollowed-out world.

Before giving these two novels a closer look, let’s consider some of the less successful attempts. Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, often referred to as the first “Great Millennial Novel” after its release, Sally Rooney’s Normal People (a shoo-in), and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.⁴

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Tony Tulathimutte is a good writer. His 2016 debut Private Citizens is full of carefully organized facts about Bay Area life in the mid-2000s, passed through four narrators in a perfect free-indirect style worthy of a James Wood blurb. Realism with such a subtle touch, a book where the author is everywhere and nowhere, runs the risk of falling into Aldridge’s trap. But Tulathimutte, unlike many contemporary writers, does not describe without the faintest hint of irony. He invokes Balzac. His characters are attempts at loveable grotesques—a tech-nerd gooner, an ex-vagabond grad-student, a well-meaning but frustrated activist—over-inflated blimps off of which hang signs that say: “Something has gone wrong.”

But the problem, Tony, is that there are too many problems. Private Citizens is the novel equivalent of that infamous buzzword, “polycrisis,” where an intellectual attempts to show that everything wrong with contemporary life is connected in order to secure tenure. Car accidents, rape, drug addiction, cheating, racism, pornography addiction, homelessness, bad sex—Private Citizens has everything but, like “polycrisis,” the breadth confuses rather than clarifies. The reader is left wondering about the ultimate value of this impressive assemblage—a great tower of dated references and lurid, yet presumably relatable, scenarios.