Perhaps every generation believes that it is unsuited to its own era. As an elder Millennial, I can’t help but see how perfectly primed my cohort was for feelings of inadequacy and distress. Raised on the standard American diet of promise and progress, many in my micro-generation arrived in high school just in time for the Columbine shootings to undermine our sense of safety. As many of us entered the age of military fitness, the Twin Towers fell and the United States embarked on a forever war. The Great Recession greeted our arrival into the job market, and coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns coincided with the years when a lot of us were becoming parents. Now our early middle age is marked by inflation, environmental chaos, and AI’s potentially existential threat to job stability. Even if most generations complain about discontent, mine may have a particularly strong case for it.
What’s a fiction writer to do with all of that joylessness? Plenty of authors in generations past made it their subject. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Tess Durbeyfield didn’t lead lives of unmitigated bliss. But contemporary fiction has a particular task: to explain and make interesting the deep disaffection of this era. It isn’t sadness, exactly, that lurks inside the hearts of Millennials and their similarly cursed younger siblings Gen Z, but something closer to lack—of security, of certainty, of sensual engagement with the world. The novelist who wants to write about how young people (barely) get by in the world today has to explain why all of this overwhelm often translates into paralysis—without boring readers to distraction.
Like its cousin the internet novel, the novel of alienation needs a stylistic foil to make it sing. Methodically charting the flatness of ennui won’t get you very far; when your readers feel as listless as your characters do, they’re likely to reach for their phone in search of dopamine hits. Instead, you have to jolt your audience into an uneasy kinship.
In I Want You to Be Happy, Jem Calder’s first novel, the author fails at this delicate task, and not spectacularly but anemically. His premise is simple: Chuck, a 35-year-old recently unengaged copywriter, meets the 23-year-old Joey, a barista with no better career prospects in view. For a few months, they casually date—a classic “situationship,” dogged on both sides by ambivalence and occasional apathy. Eventually, the relationship comes to an impasse, and each has to decide whether it’s worth their energy to carry on.
But energy is scarce in Calder’s writing. Chuck and Joey have the kind of colorless sex that Calder describes in a monotone: “He asked her the universal male sex-act-recipient questions.” The couple also have very little to say to each other in between beddings. One date features “some discussion comparing alcohol and coffee,” and during a long weekend in the country, among their most intimate remarks is: “The showers here are good.”
[Read: These Millennials can’t get out of their head]
Both partners are flailing: Chuck is put on a performance-improvement plan at his firm for poor productivity and frequent hangovers, and Joey cannot afford to buy a cocktail or live anywhere better than the squalid bedroom that she rents in a shared house. But they regard their positions with little emotion beyond self-pity. In fact, that’s how they look at all of life. Neither has any hobbies or intellectual pursuits: Nobody so much as waters a plant or visits a museum. Both claim that they want to be a writer, and these dreams generate some intriguing tension, but readers rarely get a glimpse of what they produce. Joey reads two books that we know of, a work of poetry she admires for reasons that she does not explain and another described only as “boring.” Although I Want You to Be Happy is set in present-day London, no one probes the sorry state of the post-Brexit British government, except to comment vaguely that life is too expensive and friends are leaving the city. Most important, no one displays even a wisp of curiosity. The inner lives of Chuck and Joey are as untextured as the phone screens they tap incessantly.
Curiosity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is what pulls a reader along for a fictional ride. A character may simply want to find out how their new neighbor is getting along (The Great Gatsby), or whether they’ve married the right person (Middlemarch), or whether they’ll catch the damn whale (you know the one). But along the way, a single musing can turn into many more, like branching rows of dominoes setting off new lines of inquiry about the world. Even in novels centered on Millennial inaction or stasis, such as Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, a kind of attentiveness is necessary to advance beyond rhetorical water-treading.
Other writers have successfully captured the malaise afflicting the under-45 crowd and offered nutrient-dense characters. In her clever 2021 debut novel, Three Rooms, the British writer Jo Hamya uses social realism to chronicle the downward mobility of a bright young thing, an Oxford postdoc researcher who moves from university-adjacent housing to an acquaintance’s couch and then to her childhood bedroom, her future dimming a little bit more with each domestic downgrade. By setting the action in 2018 and 2019, during the prolonged debacle of Brexit negotiations, Hamya links the degradation of the college degree to the stagnation—in the government, the economy, the culture—that has impeded progress for an entire generation.
Hilary Leichter’s 2023 novel, Terrace Story, is similarly concerned with the indignities of the housing market, but this novelist employs a different artistic lever to keep the wheels turning: She uses dark fantasy to set our world in grim relief. A magical terrace appears inside the apartment of a young family struggling to pay the rent, offering them a chance to see how the other half lives. But it also cleaves the family apart, sending them spinning toward strange futures on a warped planet Earth. Despite these complications, Terrace Story delivers a brilliant contemporary fable that chronicles how young people stuck in the saddest timeline can still make meaning.
Not every successful novel of alienation turns on financial deprivation. In fact, the central problem in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which dispenses with dialogue entirely in depicting two vacant creative professionals, is the comfort and style of their apartment. Scandinavian armchairs and monstera houseplants are all that this couple have: The accumulation of purely superficial identity markers, which they offer up online as proof of some mythical, unrealized happiness, leaves them weary and adrift. Using hyper-specific examples (Kraftwerk LPs, the German migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016), Latronico creates a book that functions as a time capsule—one that beautifully realizes his characters’ disenchantment, precisely imagining what it’s like to become trapped by an artificial, digital version of oneself.
[Read: The unhappy literary families of the internet age]
Some recent satires fail to reach the same heights of ingenuity, but they still have the consolations of humor. In her 2021 novel, Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s snappy bons mots thoughtfully ridicule our contemporary culture of disdain even as they indulge in it to a wearying degree. And in the slightly exasperating Banal Nightmare, from 2024, Halle Butler has a knack for capturing the ludicrous way that therapy-speak has turned a generation of wobbly neurotics from patients into self-ordained shrinks.
Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.
The novel’s lack of interest in what’s going on inside its characters’ phones becomes indistinguishable from a disinterest in what’s happening in their minds. Designing purely surface-level characters to comment on the ways that technology homogenizes culture is the kind of exercise that can create only distance between readers and characters. I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated—and nothing more—by reading.
Young life is certainly exhausting and at times degrading and disconcerting, but is it really as boring as it is in this book? As a reasonably settled 42-year-old, I might not be the best person to ask. But as a reader, I’m certain that if novelists want to make clear just how disappointed they are in their life and the world, they’re going to have to do it with flair. Because they’re competing with the dancing pixels, and the pixels are winning.