The Thrilla in Millennial-illa

Lorrie Moore, Sally Rooney, and the Truth About Millennial Writers

Lorrie Moore got a lot of attention last week for an essay allegedly about the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. If said essay made it across your radar, it was likely because someone was noting its true aim: An attempted haymaker against those dastardly foes known as “Millennials.”

Whoever edited Moore’s piece had the utmost respect for her. By which I mean, the essay didn’t seem to face much scrutiny. It takes great liberties with fact—David Foster Wallace is a Gen-X icon, not part of the “Boomer literary world.” It also includes more than one superfluous paragraph, and too many sentences like this one:

For the more aesthetically minded millennial, there is wondrous tattooing that bespeaks an impressive lack of worry that life might be long.

I’ll be grateful to any commenters who can tell me what that’s supposed to mean.

I want to be as fair as possible to Moore, who is one of the most accomplished and distinctive American short story writers. I appreciate that she rather deliciously frames her analysis as a classic Boomer-versus-Millennial bout and awards every single round to the elder generation. That kind of argumentative swagger is her right in such a silly genre.

Inter-generational bickering is inherently misleading, even when it feels insightful. I probably owe more to Boomers (my existence, for example) than I do to my age-peers. Not for nothing are so many of my favorite writers Boomers—Ishiguro, Houellebecq, Mantel, Watson. If Boomers and Millennials had a war, I’d be tempted to side with the generation that still pays my cellphone bill.

So if you’re going to engage in this kind of trolling, do it with gusto and don’t pull punches. Moore did exactly this, and as a result, she had me howling at several points. It’s true, we Millennials do like to cadge off our parents’ real estate—I’m writing this in my parents’ living room. She even took the time to say Zoomers are on the whole vastly superior to those of us a decade or two older than them, which is the best way to piss off my wistful generation. I doubt most Zoomers are exactly like Greta Thunberg, whom Moore approvingly cites, but I will also concede that I haven’t done nearly as much to thwart climate change as the Swedish teen.

I do think it’s instructive to pick on two claims made by Moore. Early in the essay, in the part that’s just a rant about Millennials and how much we suck, Moore says, “[Millenials] have no authentic counterculture” and then goes on a tangent about how instead we cut ourselves with knives. There are a lot of reasons why that statement—which, in fairness, must be read as polemical hyperbole—is puzzling. It starts to make sense once Moore takes one of her swings at Rooney:

Rooney’s book is written in a direct, barebones style reminiscent of a script—third-person narration, mostly present tense, quick dialogue, perfunctory stage directions, explicit time-markers, a past tense to explain why and where we are in the present… Rooney herself helped in adapting [her novel to screen], writing most of the script, and the series’s adherence to the novel’s scenes and dialogue is surely a writer’s dream. But it may also be a writer’s nightmare, since the show deepens and vivifies the novel—largely due to two sensitive performances at the helm and beautiful camera work. The series portrays states of mind much better than the novel does. Rooney is not likely to hear from viewers that “your book was better,” at least not very often or accurately, but she also may not care a whit.

First let’s address the counter-culture claim. Moore has taught a lot of creative writing students over the years. Surely she’s aware that many of her proteges have published off-beat, difficult to access, sometimes truly ambitious work in tiny literary journals or with niche book publishers. Every creative writing teacher who’s been active for decades has many former students doing this kind of writing. These labors of love are unlikely to have been rewarded with much money or even significant prestige. Are these (often Millennial) writers perhaps doing something wildly different from a Marvel movie or an Oprah’s Book Club selection? Might there be something counter about this nook of the culture with which Moore must be familiar? I’ll let you decide.

What’s already been decided is why a writer almost exactly my age (i.e., Sally Rooney) would write a novel that at times feels like a script and adapts easily to screen. Millennial writers do these things because we want to give ourselves a shot to be published and read in a literary marketplace that has only gotten more hostile, demanding, and corporately consolidated since Moore started her career. Millennial fiction writers can choose to participate in a literary counter-culture that in fact does exist, or we can try to learn and enact the somehow ironclad-yet-mercurial list of things a novel must do to be considered by commercial publishers.

It’s never been easy to be a fiction writer, but it’s only gotten harder this century. I’m happy to have a public debate about this if anyone seriously disagrees. I’ll come armed with lots of hard data, like the fact that total fiction book sales have been declining for almost a decade. I could also make some fun charts about the rate of rent increase in cultural centers such as not only New York City, but also Missoula and Nashville.

Anecdotally, I don’t know a single person in the publishing industry who’s brimming with optimism for the prospects of novels and their authors. I do know a lot of people who spend all day trying to smuggle work they consider interesting past corporate gatekeepers who often aren’t much more literate than a pair of sweaty boxing shorts. This is hard, crazy-making work, and sometimes it requires telling a writer to take a look at a screenwriting beat sheet and consider tightening up their plot structure. Moore and I run in different circles, but given the state of publishing, they can’t be that different.

You don’t have to mention any of that in order to review a TV show based on a novel, but if you’re going to throw hands at an entire generation and you want to land your punches, it would probably help if you took the time to ask why we are the way we are.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

I swore they’d be back, and they are, picking up where we left off, with our heroes getting ready to fly the coop:

We finally have a destination! I first heard of The Yukon through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which my family still watches every single Christmas Eve, and which features devil-may-care prospector Yukon Cornelius. If Watterson were more into direct references—and he really, really, really was not, for whatever reason—we might learn that Calvin heard about The Yukon the same way. I’m choosing to believe that’s the case, because this is my newsletter and my headcanon is law.

When we started following this multi-strip journey, I talked at obnoxious length about the theoretical underpinnings of Calvin’s concept of freedom. (Scroll down in this piece to get a refresher.) I find it fascinating that Calvin uses the fairly erudite, historically specific word “secede” to describe what he’s doing. In the US of A, that’s a term we mostly associate with the Confederacy. I don’t think Calvin has any secret sympathy for the Rebs, but the way he ends this comic—by making demands of an authority he’s simultaneously eschewing—is a classic of American reactionary smarm. Rights are for me, responsibilities are for thee.

While we’re on the topic, is Calvin a Millennial? If he was six years old when the comic began, in late 1985, he’d be right on the cusp. There’s something called “Generation Catalano” of which Calvin, if he were born in 1978 or 1979, would be smack in the middle. Here’s the thing, though: Calvin was six years old for the comic’s entire run, which went well into the Nineties, meaning eventually he’d be in prime Millennial territory. So as a Millennial born in 1990, I’ve decided Calvin is my age-peer. I hope the Boomers and Zoomers alike go easy on him.

Other fun things

—Meagan Day with a lovely remembrance of Michael Brooks, a journalist and commentator who sadly left us far too soon

—I always enjoy Brandy Jensen’s advice column, Ask A Fuck-Up, and this one particularly got to me

—One of my favorite editors and an all-around mensch, Jeremy Gordon, has a new newsletter about arts and culture. I loved his piece on Japandroids, a band I also adore

A poem

Hedgehog