Crushingly self-aware protagonists, the search for a place to call home, a longing for stability ... is the millennial generation too fragmented to be defined, asks Olivia Sudjic
“There’s no writing,” Bret Easton Ellis declared recently of millennials. “They don’t care about literature. None of them read books.” Ellis asserted this during the publicity tour for his book White, a collection of essays about contemporary culture, presumably while his long-suffering millennial boyfriend Todd ripped through the latest Sally Rooney in the next room.
Putting aside Ellis’s claim not to know who Rooney is, it’s predictable that literature should be yet another realm in which this generation is dismissed. The anointing of one book as a cultural touchstone, one individual as the oracle, and the fallacy of meritocracy that underpins it, is patently absurd. But as with every other millennial-bashing trope, so is the generalisation about our inability to produce one.