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
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.
Since he does not convincingly order the novel’s incidents, Tulathimutte leaves the reader to garner their pleasure from nostalgic recognition—of brands, fashion-styles, and fugacious speech-patterns. Writing for The Guardian, Sarah Ditum sums up perfectly what Private Citizens achieves:
What results is a time capsule rather than a novel. Private Citizens repeatedly spins you out of the fiction to check when smartphones became ubiquitous, or at what time the word “cishet” might plausibly have appeared in the vocabulary of the right-on, or when describing oneself as a “ronin” or “ninja” became a tedious habit in the creative industries. Tulathimutte reliably gets these details right, but details are all they are. They signify little more than nostalgia. In the absence of complex characters and a detailed social world, Private Citizens is less Middlemarch and more I Love the 00s.
“Time capsule” is no exaggeration. You cannot read a page of Private Citizens without sentences like:
“Day-Glo satin headband, all inked up like some community mural, high-waisted shorts like denim diapers.”
“Linda’s attention ran out across the dim loud bar. All was so douchey, so fug: the Roman sandals and harem pants, feather hair extensions, feather earrings, guys wearing T-shirts of the tech companies they worked for, or that guy wearing . . . cat ears?”
“He teaches her the Tao of the freebie—music off Soulseek, movies off BitTorrent, booze from house parties, furniture from Craigslist, craggy lemons from the bushes on West Campus.”
Without transforming the fleeting impressions of life in the early 2000s into something solid—a proper judgment—Private Citizens ties itself to the salience of these impressions, of which we forget more and more (and more are born who will never be able to “remember” them). And so the book was doomed to be a period piece at best, which is, of course, what it now is. No one is going around in 2025 and hawking Private Citizens as the Great Millennial Novel. Tulathimutte’s book best serves as a warning. While dense with gathered details, it is not an improvement on the “surface-level” minimalists that Aldridge critiques, because, despite Tulathimutte’s efforts, he does not effectively do anything with them.
On the other hand, in his 2019 novel, The Topeka School, Ben Lerner organizes his memories of teenage life in the 1990s and juxtaposes them against contemporary experience—with a clear sense of purpose, in shimmering workshop prose. Lerner is impervious to the complaints lodged against Tulathimutte and the hip minimalists writers of the ’80s and ’90s as read by Aldridge. Lerner’s problem is just that he’s wrong. He has the misfortune of judging the age through a framework on its last legs—a therapeutic NPR liberalism so hopelessly naive and out-of-touch that reading this book, published only seven years ago, feels like being thrown into an alien world.
There is subtlety and care in Lerner’s portrayal of Topeka, his younger self, and the flaws of his parents. But he cannot help using all this material (along with the awkward insertion of political rants) to tell a very simple fairytale. The guilty phrase in Lerner’s world, which he cannot help repeating again and again, is “boys will be boys.” For him, there is a straight line from the childish anger of male adolescence to Donald Trump. The implied solution? Therapy. Ben Lerner confesses his deepest secrets, and airs out his parents’ failures in graphic detail, all to write a millennial bildungsroman whose closest relative is a 2016 Slate article.
It feels trite to say in 2026, but the moral battleground of millennial life has not been misogyny. There is no simple causal chain stretching from the existence of privileged white “man-children” to the election of Donald Trump. Moshfegh, in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, treats history more fairly when 9/11 forces her narrator out of her stupor. The world’s chaos is not subdued for a moral lesson about how to be a “good heckin person.” Instead it becomes a drug. For the millennial, history is not a nightmare to be awoken from, but a stimulant that staves off eternal sleep.5 As the marijuana grew more potent, history’s value as a drug has inexorably diminished from the days of Lerner’s Boomer father:
Then there was the world: it was 1969, little improvised bombs detonating across Manhattan, perpetual campus protests; there was outrage, but also a sense of community, of carnival; we felt that history was alive. Jane and I were both increasingly active in the antiwar movement; my younger brother, who would prefer to be left out of a novel, was in the nascent Weather Underground; my father and I were barely speaking after our last fight over the war; all the orders, personal and political, were crumbling.
Today we read and can only laugh sadly at Lerner’s own whimper of a protest ending:
We found Natalia, and Luna hugged her and asked her to lift her up onto her shoulders, which Natalia did. One of the organizers stood on a stone bench and yelled, “Mic check,” and we all yelled it back. The “human microphone,” the “people’s mic,” wherein those gathered around a speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify a voice without permit requiring equipment. It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.
What is so unfortunate about The Topeka School is how much of a missed opportunity it is. Lerner dwells on the conflict between successive generations; the effect of the parents on the child, which Moshfegh and Lin examine mercilessly, but he cannot see the irony of his parents’ generation’s experiences juxtaposed against his, or how the attitude of that generation might have immiserated his own. Tangled in his therapeutic frame, he can only blame them for not going far enough: for being unable to stamp out the noxious misogyny that—though Lerner can never quite explain how—singlehandedly holds up “the age of the angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization.” The Topeka School fails not because Lerner won’t judge the period from outside of itself, but because he only attempts to vivisect the times with the bluntest of instruments.
It is hard to talk about Sally Rooney because one has the sense both that there is little left to be said, but also that the powers that be have barely set limits on what one can say about her. For many, Rooney is a scapegoat. She is accused of writing MFA prose, this writer who famously does not have an MFA. She is pilloried for being political and for not being political enough. She is savaged for “pretending” not to work hard. “It’s fine,” ten thousand broke artists and graduate students say, smiling with wolves’ teeth, “she can take it.” Why? She has succeeded where all of us have failed, and in the impoverished space of contemporary letters, there is no greater crime you can commit than that. I will try for restraint in the face of this endless catty chatter. But, will the work endure? Does she succeed in cutting up millennial life and revealing something wholly original and lasting? I don’t think so.
To treat her 2018 book Normal People as a millennial novel, of course, requires that we find the heart of the times in a single relationship. It is not at all like Moshfegh’s grim parable, Lin’s autofictional eye camera, Lerner’s morality play, or Tulathimutte’s conjured nostalgia.6
Normal People is written like it is a romance. There is tremendous tension in the sparse believable sentences. There can be no doubt that her characters have absent-mindedly strayed into something called love. But there can also be no doubt that, with Rooney’s complicity, they grotesquely misinterpret the situation they’ve arrived in over and over again. The language they use to discuss their relationship continually crushes it:
“from the other room Marianne said: Imagine how bitter I’m going to be when you meet someone else and fall in love. She often makes little jokes like this.”
“Marianne hasn’t seen him since May. He moved home after the exams and she stayed in Dublin. He said he wanted to see other people and she said: Okay. Now, because she was never really his girlfriend, she’s not even his ex-girlfriend. She’s nothing.”
“Look, he says, I probably should have told you before, but I’ve been seeing someone. I’ve been with her for a while, I should have mentioned it to you.”
And yet the dichotomy Rooney sets up in the plot is not about overcoming the sheer poverty of these phrases culture has given them for grappling with love, but about treating love as “freeing” rather than “dominating” (crudely represented by the circus of abusers Marianne is made to deal with). This culminates in one final act of freeing love: the presumed sacrifice of a love they both know they will never feel for anyone else. Thus Connell goes to America to get an MFA:
She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
Lauren Oyler sums it up perfectly: “It’s so reasonable it’s almost absurd, though NYU acceptance as a happy ending is very millennial.” What betrays Rooney, is that there is not a hint of irony. This really is intended to be a happy ending. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this in The Guardian:
But what lifts it beyond Conversations is that there’s so much hope here. Marianne has “never believed herself fit to be loved by any person” but Connell has set her free from that place and, whatever happens next, it’s clear that this effect will be long-lasting. In fact, perhaps the question of whether these two will end up together isn’t even the real question. Love changes us, but it also frees us and, as Rooney asserts here so very triumphantly, no one can take that away.
Normal People is actually an anti-romance. In an age blatantly deprived of romance—where inimical values are raised in its stead (“self-discovery,” “independence,” “freedom,” and “financial well-being)”—how can it be anything more than a mirror of how we already think? How can it reveal anything we do not already find seeped into our lives? Is it cynical to wonder if the great financial success of Normal People and Conversations with Friends is because they affirm a way of life that we’ve sleepwalked into? That while Rooney avoids the trap of focusing on what will soon be dated exteriors, like Tulathimutte, or judging what has already passed as a naive moral fairytale, like Lerner, the lessons she extracts are so bound up with the shifting sensibilities of now, that they have already begun to rot?
In Normal People, Rooney performs a bait-and-switch: replacing (or perhaps apologizing for the replacement that has already happened) an older ideal conception of love with one fit for our times. This is why Normal People is both romantic and anti-romantic, and why any attempt to treat it as a generational novel is doomed from the start. Although it might appear otherwise, it is not clear that Rooney is taking up a critical attitude towards the times except in ancillary ways. No one has fallen into Aldridge’s trap more than Rooney has, and no writer has been more richly rewarded for reiterating how we’ve already been taught to feel about love. Rooney has picked out the wrong problems and proffered us the answers we’ve already heard.
There is a dearth of platitudes about learning from failure, but how much can we learn from literature that does not go all the way—literature that is destined to, and perhaps already is beginning to, fade from our memory with every passing year?
To give the most extreme example, in his book The Georgian Revolt, Robert H. Ross notes that:
In 1911 the future of English poetry seemed to rest in the hands of poets like Stephen Phillips and William Watson.
You could spend two hundred years analyzing the verse of these two forgotten poets and never come any closer to predicting the bounty of literary innovation that awaited English poetry over the next decade. Some projects, the age judges, are simply dead ends.
But is that really the case here? I’m not sure the issue is a lack of formal inventiveness or craft. Compared with the books I’ve discussed, the two novels that I think come closest to succeeding as millennial novels differ more in degree than in kind.
The three books above all fail to fulfill our central demand of a generational novel—to make the age answerable. Tony Tulathimutte knows something has gone wrong, but cannot find the root cause. Ben Lerner’s judgement is superficial. And Sally Rooney does not actually judge at all because she draws conclusions that were already received and commonplace.
Ottessa Moshfegh and Tao Lin are strange bedfellows. But their “generational” novels, unlike those writers, go further and converge on the same penetrating critique of millennial life from opposite directions. And so, it is their novels, if any, that most deserve the title of “Great Millennial Novel.”
How could anyone call Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (a “BookTok” staple) a great millennial novel (and I am not the first person to do so) when the main character was born in 1973—the same year as my Gen X parents?
This is Moshfegh’s wonderful trick, which immediately sets up the novel as more of a generational fable than a simple attempt to describe the times as they are. Setting the book in the 1990s lets Moshfegh avoid the tedious sifting and analysis required to keep a contemporary work from unduly focusing on what will seem ephemeral to posterity. She shifts the text’s background to an era that has already been excavated and highlights those elements that will later flower when millennials come to age. Hence the narrator’s references to a number of cultural markers that could have been common during her college years if she was really a little younger and a millennial, but actually were not. The narrator presumably goes to college from 1991 to 1995 and yet references “The Moldy Peaches” (who did not break out until the late 1990s), “Dogme 95”(there were no Dogme 95 films until 1998), and “black Moleskine pocket [notebooks]” (the company was founded in 1997). And even those signifiers that are plausible, like the reference to pretentious young men reading David Foster Wallace, only reach their full fruition in the early 2000s, when the oldest millennials had reached adulthood.
Moshfegh makes her generational transposition even more explicit with the narrator’s family. She is a generational hybrid—her father was born in 1942 (Silent Generation) and her mother in 1953 (Baby Boomer)—but it becomes clear from her remarks that she is more affected by her father’s absence, both in family life and by his early death, than by any sort of passed down worldview. And so she follows in her Baby Boomer mother’s footsteps—though far less radically—by trying to mollify her neurotic consciousness (a cue perhaps from her “mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead” after committing suicide).
Moshfegh has a pseudo-millennial subject in a pseudo-millennial world, but for what purpose? The world she evokes is disgusting and the narrator is a nauseating creation:
“You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. “Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain.
She has a trash-can-shaped soul filled with whatever has been haphazardly tossed inside. Naturally this has a devastating effect on the way the world appears to her narrator and the way things come to be meaningful for her, which is to say that they don’t. It would be challenging to write a more gratuitously nauseating book than this. Yet what saves Moshfegh’s book from being a Less Than Zero pastiche and falling back into the sheer nihilism Aldridge decries is its superb irony (also perhaps the distance between her narrator and herself in comparison with Ellis) and the ridiculous ending.
Moshfegh is an unashamed moralist, more detached from contemporary sensibilities than Rooney and more grounded than Lerner. For her, the millennial malaise is wholly internal, a curse—the trash-can soul—passed down from the Baby Boomers—a generation drunk on new meanings who left their children to endure the next day’s clean-up without any help or guidance. And yet her narrator’s twisted deliverance can only come from that same drug so prized by her mother’s generation:
ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.
A stale life, made only endurable by History’s occasional intrusion. This, to Moshfegh, is the millennial age.
If Moshfegh’s diagnosis is correct, a truly authentic millennial fiction writer—one who doesn’t contort fictional plots into being morbidly interesting or write as ironically as her—would not be able to sell any books. They would contort life into such a nightmare, the sequence of the day into a nauseating doldrum where one moment follows the next without any rhyme or reason—except perhaps when forced awake for a moment by the intrusion of “Events,” that the reader would feel too ill to finish, much less recommend the book to anyone else. This is what it feels like to read Tao Lin.
In describing the experience of reading Taipei, there is nothing I can add to the first line of Lydia Kiesling’s viral 2013 review: “When I began to read Taipei on my morning commute, I wondered if I had been lobotomized in the night.”
This is not surprising, considering that the entire novel is a series of paragraphs like this, mixed with tedious descriptions of parties and drug use:
The next afternoon, walking to a street market, Paul and Erin stopped to look at a two-story McDonald’s with five employees outside speaking into megaphones, sometimes in unison, waving banners and flags. Paul said there were fewer McDonald’s in Taiwan than fifteen years ago, that this was probably a “last-ditch effort,” which seemed to be working (the first floor— they could see through the glass front—was entirely filled with customers). Erin said they should improvise a documentary titled Taiwan’s Last McDonald’s or Taiwan’s First McDonald’s. They walked to the end of the street market and back, on the same route, buying and eating things, then bought and ate egg tarts from two different bakeries, then with nervous grins earnestly discussed eating however many egg tarts it would take for them to not want more, but resisted and returned to the apartment building, where they lay for an hour in the building’s sauna and dog-paddled, in a heated pool, to six different massage stations, including one—partly simulating a waterfall, maybe—where water fell eight to ten feet in pummeling, faucet-like columns onto the tops of their heads.
And yet Tao Lin does sell books. Why? Because of his central conceit, his submission to sterile millennial form: the events in his books have actually happened to him. Like a freeway crash, who won’t take at least one little peek? He strips the confessional mode so abused by millennials of its subject—replacing “I” with an impersonal protagonist, changing names, the usual autofiction schtick. Writers have to make a living and even great writers would like to be read, so Tao Lin paid his toll with dirty gossip and tedious revelations.
What is the sickness that Lin conceals beneath boring description, barely anonymized names, and debauchery that was only ever shocking to his parents and people in the “know” (“She got with Tao Lin, seriously?”)? As with Moshfegh, it is the grotesque state of the millennial subject.7
He roots through the trash-can soul—himself, stocked full of cliches about life: “He imagined his trajectory as a vacuum-sealed tube, into which he’d arrived and through which—traveling alone in the vacuum-sealed tube of his own life—he’d be suctioned and from which he’d exit.” Depressed and alone, he is without any guidance from society or his parents besides a kind of confused and hopeless love.
Lin, like Moshfegh’s narrator, reacts to his existence in a world where he can do anything by unconsciously attempting to become nothing: a sleepwalking zombie instead of a couch comatose.
(“Sleeping, waking,” he said frustratedly. “Is there a difference? Am I dead?”)
And while only the intrusion of History can jolt Moshfegh’s narrator from her slumber, at the end of Taipei it is Lin’s redeemingly facile attempt at love that makes him “[feel] grateful to be alive.” Yet, like Rooney’s characters, Lin lacks anything besides stock formulations to express his newfound state. The possibility of true redemption remains up in the air. The question left open is whether the intimacy between Paul and Erin is, like the intrusion of history, a temporary answer to millennial slumber. But it is still an answer.
Lin’s sincere autofiction and Moshfegh’s transparently constructed story start formally from opposite positions but converge upon the stark reality of millennial life, as well as potential antidotes (life with stakes—the intrusion of something overwhelming into the lives of these protagonists), that might wake the millennial sleepers, at least for a moment.
Lin and Moshfegh take the generational novelist’s task seriously and avoid the error of simply describing what it feels like to be a millennial without judgment or an imaginative transformation that lends the reader with a deeper sense of the period, beyond fleeting period details. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Taipei, then, are the closest thing we have to “Great Millennial Novels.”
Putting these books up against the great harvest of 20th century American literature yields disappointing results. But, as Aldridge notes repeatedly in Talents and Technicians, given the conditions of literary production for the last several decades, should we be surprised that almost all of the books trumpeted by mainstream institutions as “Great Millennial Novels” reflect the experiences and judgement of an overeducated, insulated, and ideologically stifled class—largely unable to detach themselves from contemporary sensibilities to pursue something broader (regardless of how naive such a search maybe sometimes be)? Indeed, though they are insufficient, I think it something of a miracle that novels as incisive as My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Taipei exist at all, much less are well-known, widely read, and in the former case—part of “BookTok.”
And today, without a doubt, the literary world is continuing to loosen. With the decline of literary fiction sales, the drastic decline in relevance mainstream magazines that discuss literary fiction, and the diminished heft of the MFA everyone seems to have (along with the siloed academic position that no one has), we have evidently moved towards a “decentralized literary ecosystem.”8 I’ve already discussed in some detail how this happened as well as the boon it may prove to be. The gift, for both critics and writers, is that until institutions re-form and ossify, the millennial writer can swim freely in the ocean of facts and interpretations, no longer bound by arbitrary style guides and those preferences and incentive structures that were built up over the last half century and made the desperate plunge for greatness all the more difficult. To them I say: Good luck.
This is a rather ironic interview because I do not expect Ellis himself to be etched into literary immortality and his fleeting popularity came from behaving in the same manner as the writers he is criticizing.
Aldridge, who saw it “as [his] sacred duty to perform a deflating operation … on various writers whose reputations seemed to me to have become inordinately enlarged” was often dismissed as “a bit of a curmudgeon” in his later years, but was praised by Norman Mailer as “the nearest guideline to absolute truth that the working novelist had in my young days.”
Even though, as you’ll see, I agree—I think this writer should probably have included the caveat that the book’s main character is the same age as my parents and a member of Gen X; in fact I’m not sure if there is a single millennial character in the entire novel.
This should be considered a millennial novel, given the period he treats and the fact that his age lies on the cusp between Millennials and Generation X.
This was also the case for the Baby Boomers. Who do you see at protests? Who ‘got’ to march in the ’60s?
If there is one thing that this study of millennial novels has disabused me of, it’s the notion that there is not serious formal experimentation being done in an attempt to capture the millennial experience — while the matter (too often the unadorned prose of the workshop) does blend together; these writers have twisted their material in a myriad of interesting ways.
Alas, nothing I say about Lin is unequivocally true of his alt-lit kin.
This sort of phrasing reminds me of the endless bickering over whether we should refer to various historical periods once referred to as “declines” instead as “transformations” (The later centuries of the Western Roman and Ottoman Empires, the cramped development of Islamic-period cities, etc)—the ‘decentralization’ is certainly a decline in some sense, but it is still a tremendous opportunity.
Great piece!
I’m giving you ten minutes to correct ‘shoe-in’ to ‘shoo-in’.