Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel

I don't even have to read the article to tell you the reason is because there is far less literary talent due to lack of education, plus the soaring industry for TV, movies, and videogames has killed culture. Culture doesn't even exist anymore, society is on a constant assembly line of superficial trends disguised as real culture.

>hemingway
>straight

Because us millennials are BORING. There's no rebellion anymore. It's all hugboxes and safe spaces. You can't write anything innovative if you wanted to for this demographic because they're so sensitive that any social commentary would need to be castrated so as not to hurt any feelings. Any book that widely appeals to millennials is going to be trash. Kids my age have no sense of humor or drive for adventure.

Reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Dead Souls:

>It is enough simply to say that there is a stupid man in a certain town, and it already becomes personal; suddenly a gentleman of respectable appearance pops up and shouts: “But I, too, am a man, which means that I, too, am stupid”—in short, he instantly grasps the situation.

>millennial lit sucks because there is not enough focus on degenerates and nonwhites
It's the opposite m8

Millennial are a lost generation. They are fucked. Nobody will remember any of them, they won't do anything great, they'll just make kids and consume.

The next cultural and artistic movement will be neo-fascist and revolutionary. Millennial won't be a part of it though. You wasted your time on degenerate leftist nonsense.

>tfw not a millennial

lol fuck off grandpa

>Kids my age
>one of my favorite passages from Dark Souls
>The next cultural and artistic movement will be neo-facist and revolutionary

Are these posts ironic?

>suddenly a gentleman of respectable appearance pops up and shouts: “But I, too, am a man, which means that I, too, am stupid”—in short, he instantly grasps the situation.

lel Nu-male got shrekted

No. Stay mad, nu-male.

Nice projecting nu-male

>projecting your own projection

Ah the whole reverse projection suplex

You've fallen right into my trap nu-male

Assuming that the idea of a 'millennial novel' is supposed to attract people from 16-25, I don't quite think Undertale counts. It feels like the fan-base for that game are like around 13.

>why doesn't anyone like my novel?!?!?!?

>doesn't know the difference between Gogol and a fucking playstation game
>pretends to understand the nuances of modern culture more than other posters

but i loooove traveling!

>doesn't know the difference between Gogol and a fucking playstation game

What is the difference?

Millenials ended in 1995 friend.

No one who has it in them to write a great novel is going to be stopped by the crappy entertainment we have now. Plebs have always been doing plebby things and patricians have always been doing patrician things.

There's more rigor in an intro to philosophy final essay than this "professional writer's" piece.

WHITE
FUCKING
MALES

enough of this autism

exactly.

this guy made me seriously consider popular-vote euthanasia as an acceptable method of decentralized murder. holy shit, he's so stupid i'm sure that if you told him he was being an idiot, he wouldn't believe you. oh my fucking god, i'm so triggered right now.

how is it possible that any one person could be *just this* idiotic. it doesn't even make comprehensible sense. this is stupidity that predates stupidity, some inceptive grain of stupid that was supposed to be used to inseminate a little bit of stupid into everyone, only god fucked up, and now all the stupid of the world is incapsulated into this one dumb motherfucker's mind.

i wonder if he needs people to help him wake up in the morning. does he listen to an audio track that repeates "breathe in, breathe out" over and over? how does he not asphyxiate on the fact that he must be so stupid he hasn't once in his life been able to pour water out of a bowl and onto the floor?

>"You might get some vague notion of me if I told you I’m a first-generation Thai-American, middle-class, atheist, single, childless, postgraduate, freelancing, New Englander, straight, male millennial. But it’s probably more telling to say that I once took a first date home to watch zit-popping videos on YouTube, or that I accidentally interrupted my college graduation ceremony with a screaming toy monkey I’d forgotten I’d been carrying all day ('Sorry, my monkey went off,' I explained)."

i'm earnestly so confused at how anyone--even a fucking child scribbling with crayon months after being born--could put together a sentence like this, step back from it, EDIT IT, then think, "yes, this, this is okay," AND THEN send it off to be published.

i don't understand how some THING, let alone some ONE is capable of such insulting idiocy. it makes me feel guilty to be human. it makes me guilty to even breathe the same air that this "writer" breathes, day in, and day out.

i wonder what he thinks every day. i wonder what compels him. i wonder the kinds of things he does on a daily basis. does he bathe regularly in his own feces, not for enjoyment, but because he genuinely thinks it the sanitary thing to do?

how do you think he approaches solving problems? how do you think his conversations with people go? do you think everyone around him just pities him because of his profound lack of any semblance of the ability to process information, let alone the ability to reason? i think it's quite likely he got this far in his life only because people felt so badly for him that they didn't want him to just fall between the cracks.

i don't understand how this is possible, i really don't. someone, PLEASE explain how this is possible. this stupidity is not of this universe. i have no words to even describe it.

>So why do I get acid reflux whenever someone says, however truthfully or flatteringly, that I’ve written a novel about millennials? Partly because I don’t want to be taken for the kind of putz who declares himself a poster boy for anything, but also because my only goal was to write about my own experiences.

THIS IS WHAT HE CLAIMS
THEN
I GO TO HIS WEBSITE
LOOK WHAT IS ON
THE
FIRST
FUCKING
PAGE

SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I HAVE A FUCKING STROKE

You fucking idiot.

But it's just cliche and annoying at this point.
I have nothing against diversity in literature. But to sit there an unironically type out shit like this is cringeworthy.
>There's no great American novels because of
>WHITE
>FUCKING
>MALES

The "rebellion" that exists today is that of complaining about tv shows not being inclusive and why videogames are so sexist. Trump may be the end of America, but he sprouted more tumblrinas that could ever have occurred naturally.

>Those white guys amirite?

Fuck off Tony I know a banana when I see one. You're next on the sjw shitlist after me and rightly so.

Is that novel on the right any good? I keep seeing it at work.

If he doesn't say that it's because everybody is simply too busy trying to be their own brand then he's wrong.

Isnt TAIPEI by Tao Lin considered millennial?

>Dark Souls

haha holy shit. you cant make this up.

MEIN SIDES

oh yeah no one remembers the Lost Generation

Kek, i thought i was a millenial.

Nah man, we're the next generation.

Millenials are the Vice News, Lena Durnham, Sam Hyde types.
Their childhood was in the television age and the internet was this big new opening to them, where new possibilities questions and horizons are in front of them.

We the Post-Millenials are born and raised on memes. We're jaded and realistic as a result.

not just education (ie people who want to make being a writer their primary job) but there's no money in it, earlier in the 20th century you could make a living publishing short stories so then you could write novels or whatever- now even pretty successful writers have to have academic jobs so they have to be a. lucky b. able to play that game, getting a mfa first and even then from only a few (expensive, exclusive) programs (look at the top books published this year- most newcomers are from the same schools) and still work on writing and/or c. come from money/connection to the publishing world so now 90+% of new novelists are dilettantes, rich kids, molded into the same old dullness or suck ups- usually all of the above

>why-theres-no-millennial-novel
even this author
"he currently attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop,"
lol ok
being jaded is not new

Everyone thinks they're actually the jaded one. Its like Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

You Millenials live in a fairytale world and will never know it

what's your problem with him exactly though, you're sort of just railing on about how "stupid" he is

nice

His main argument is that novels are too narrow in their focus (often on the problems of one or a small group of characters) to really capture the entire breadth and depth of a generation.

As a corollary, he adds that most "voice of a generation" novels follow the same general themes (unhappy middle or upper class young people experiencing emotional development), they tend to be abstractions more than an actual representation, and the attempts to define "generations" in the first place are just an attempt to create easy marketing checkboxes and discourage individualism.

Unfortunately, he chose to take a halfhearted swipe at the straight white male bogeyman, which both undercut his point about identity being personal and not just a bunch of demographic checkboxes, and inadvertently triggered a couple of posters to chimp out. Very few people seem to have read or understood the article.

Hey! You just did that thing!

>killed culture

You're too stupid to breathe. Culture can't be killed, it only changes with the introduction of new mediums and distribution platforms. The internet and video games have changed culture. The booming movie and TV show industry have changed culture. Social media turned culture on its head and rewrote the books on interaction. This kind of bullshit gets parroted by idiots every time a new form of entertainment media is introduced throughout history.

Its simple to see in how politics functions between generations.
For Millenials you had your Occupy Wallstreet and you have your figures on both side of the "culture war", scrapping over bullshit about identity.

We on the other hand are natural nihilists, we weren't exposed to the truth about how the planet is near doomed and how meaningless everything is as adults. At which point you simply deploy cognitive dissonance to ignore these stark realities.
We accepted them as the basis, before anything else.

Then why is that most college students can't be fucked to read a book?

That kind of philistinism would have been unheard of in 1916. Even the guys who only cared about sports and dances would have done their course readings.

so basically the millenial+1 generation has the same philosophy as the chinese government?

All the "voice of a generation" novels are subpar anyway. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, true, but The Sound & The Fury is better, and I'd hardly call Faulkner a representative of his generation.

Social trends are moving in the opposite direction though, towards acceptance and infantalization. Generation Z (the kids coming up right now) are even more radically progressive. Neo-Marxism is enormously trendy among kids. Liberalism will go downhill in favor of stronger leftism. Racism as a social institution is against the ropes and being bludgeoned to death, your fascist revolution would die in the cradle. The youthful rebellion is against the rigid social standards of their parents and accepting those who are different from them, but striking back hard against those who oppose their acceptance. Its a bizarre form of totalitarianism

If you want to discuss what the future will look like, at least pretend you go outside every once in a while or interact with media sources outside of your internet fascist hugboxes.

this is necessarily true. There are a ton more people now than in 1920 so there are more people who don't read books because of that. And also if anything people are reading more in general being on their phone or computer 24/7 so people havent lost the urge to read just the urge to concentrate on one thing for several hours at a time.

Holy fucking hell you are triggered. Its like you've never heard of a dumbed down clickbait piece before.

its probably just taste, both are very good.

Good thing i'm not like that (or bad, idk). I hope tha t doesn´t apply to my country, since leftism (and bad management) is ruining this place. I fear we will be the next Venzuela.

>he actually thinks being jaded and unhappy with the world is a construct of modern youth culture
:^)

Yes. Which is rather poignent

No, Gatsby is "very good." TSATF is sublime. It's an order of magnitude better.

People have been saying that for well over a fucking decade and a half

>Lack of education

rly

Its all about degrees, for millenials their "edginess" is saying
"Huh man there's no God and the Government isn't perfect, what a fucked up world."

Martin Shkreli is an example of what we can expect from this new generations future.

No it isn't you tards. Edgy kids are mostly fascists and neo-Nazis now. Marxism is dead to the youth.

What bothers me more than anything is the self-defeating politics of millennials.
>the government is bad!
>we should vote for a new president from one of two status quo candidates while ignoring local elections, alternative choices, or midterm elections!
>but...but wait! Why did nothing change?
>oh well, the system is broken, might as well not vote
>but we can riot for a while and bitch on social media about the results
Millennials are paper tigers. A totalitarian state could wrap its fist around them and they would embrace it with open arms if it promised to be nice to gays and women and used fluffy teddy bears and cute kittens for its symbols instead of iron eagles.
And its one thing to be irreligious, but this new atheism, basically a faith based on not believing in any faith, is a new and militant construct of edgy rebellion that effectively leads fucking nowhere. There's no ideology behind it, nothing but angst.

maybe that generation doesnt care enough about the novel as a medium

I'm not talking a couple thousand edgy white kids in the bowels of the internet yelling about teh joos, I'm talking about mainstream youth culture, the one that makes up 95%+ of their scene. I'm talking about the culture in major urban centers and college campuses that actually controls influence.

This is accurate. Most literary critics worth a shit agree on this.

>I'm not talking a couple thousand edgy white kids in the bowels of the internet yelling about teh joos, I'm talking about mainstream youth culture, the one that makes up 95%+ of their scene. I'm talking about the culture in major urban centers and college campuses that actually controls influence.
>implying the Marxists aren't breeding the new edgy generation to become even more right-wing
>implying that THESE kids are more important than THOSE kids
Go back to leftypol you delusional child

And of course they hate guns, so violent rebellion is out of the question.

>a small minority is more important than a majority
>a couple rebellious teens online spouting racial nationalist rhetoric have any relevance in the political process

You have too much hope for the new generation. They're embracing cultural marxism hook, line, and sinker. I bet you also think Veeky Forums elected Trump instead of the disillusioned anti-establishment conservatives looking for a "straight talker" lmao.

That's the punchline to the whole joke. They're literally disarming themselves.

Definition of a millenial and sjw bullshit and counter-bullshit aside can we acknowledge that this article is just fucking bad on a basic level

How do people end up writing something in the goddamn New Yorker that just half-assedly states a truism, shows no supporting facts at all, brings up no real counter-arguments, and just wanks over a single opinion that he repeats in every paragraph until that limp-wristed ending

What the fuck is this

>phone
>computer
>reading

I mentioned "books" user. Reading a synopsis of a show on Netflix isn't exactly what I had in mind.

>How do people end up writing something in the goddamn New Yorker that just half-assedly states a truism
>in the goddamn New Yorker
>New Yorker

The solution is to stop holding the goddamn New Yorker in high esteem. Its a jizzrag for the liberal establishment to bitch and moan for pageviews.

>meaning and permanence are equal
>you millennials don't get how deep I am
Cut yourself much on that edge?

Lol I was talking about the book, you dip.

>intimidated millenial clinging to cartoon pop-philosophy

Away away, old children stay in the pram

I'm gonna read Private Citizens

>le nihilism le best philosophy

kek good luck with your deadwood worldview

>rebellion is the sole source of innovation
>he actually thinks the outrage culture isn't an extreme minority that's actively dying
>boo hoo us millennials suck I was born in the wrong generation like if you agree

The only reason you're informed enough to make this half-assed attempt at social commentary is because you were born when you were. The irony is palpable when I see millenials complain that such and such generation was better and not realize they only have the ability to see this because of the Internet. We live in a time where everyone is free to be a perfect individual, millions upon millions of unique individual cultures have been formed because we have the ability to communicate instantly and take influence from every time, era, culture, movement etc.

This.

>we're jaded and realistic as a result
You do realize that the opinions you have are actually carefully engineered by the memes you digest right?

Post-millennials shit on the news media, yet fall for the exact same shit if it falls into the form of a buzzfeed article or meme.

Nigga quit thinking you shit when you aint.

I don't know what everyone's problem is with this guy. I think his points are fair, if not exactly groundbreaking. Culture is nowhere near as cohesive as it used to be. A society might take Paradise Lost as a fair representaiton of itself when everyone in that society is Protestant, for example, but it's hard to see the threads that tie this generation together.

Bah, if they're so infantile they'll be easily manipulated. They already are. One would merely need to alter the information they received and the influences they imbibed, and they'd be easily redirected.

To add to this, I don't know why everyone's bagging on him for the "white male" comment. I'm an Eastern European white guy with an English degree, and there're definitely novels that I think I understand more as a result of that. I read Baldwin or Ellison, and while I appreciate them, I don't quite relate to them in the same way or understand them as I do something like Bulgakov, Roth, or DFW.

Fair points, but why actually read something and give the author a fair shake when you can play culture warrior on a Thai fisherman pants appreciation blog?

I think the equivalent to religion in our society is our general outlook on political identity, stuff like not questioning democracy, equal rights, the plight of the oppressed, etc.

I can't think of anything people get quite so worked up about as political identity

There's no millennial novel because millennials don't read books.

50 shades of shit?
The fault in our stars?

>50 shades of shit

This joke is to humor as a coffin is to a child.

Spoiler alert: it's terrible.

Youre either not a college student or you have no friends or you attend a pleb school

Private Citizens is good if you can stand lines like this:
"The heat itched on his face and his need to fart had a medical direness to it – possibly IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, polyps. Or death. Yeah: chronic death; death not otherwise specified."