No More Salingers

Can any single author truly be the "voice of a generation"? Will any author ever represent such common generational ideas that we trust one voice to speak for all? Having written my master's thesis on the Canadian author Douglas Coupland, pegged the voice of Generation X, I take a look at that conundrum with this recent piece for The Curator magazine.

I once read a pop culture essay which identified thriller writer John Grisham as “this generation’s Charles Dickens.” Part of me smiled at the cool insight the reference provided to an author I enjoyed escaping with; the other part of me rolled my eyes in snobby contempt for such an outrageous, aloof, and absurd statement. Can any writer truly be compared to Dickens, and if so, wouldn’t a writer like Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison more likely be the Dickens of Grisham’s generation? Or perhaps a better question is: can we be done with tagging any contemporary writer as “this generation’s” Dickens or Twain or Austen or any other distinct voice from the past? I’ve felt this way often, most recently with the rise of Irish writer and Trinity grad Sally Rooney, who by age twenty-seven was garnering raves for her first two novels, Normal People and Conversations with Friends, and who was referred to by her editor at Faber & Faber as the “Snapchat generation’s Salinger.” Perhaps it’s time to end the “voice of a generation” moniker and let Salinger and the others rest in peace while allowing all authors to just be themselves.


In her most recent work, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Rooney has taken aim at her literary celebrity, portraying a young novelist’s discomfort with her fame and the expectations that come from speaking so aptly to and for a large demographic, in her case the Millennials, which may or may not be “the Snapchat generation.” In creating the character of Alice, a famous author who has just released her third novel and laments both her success and her valuing of that success, Rooney takes a meta-fictional and clearly sardonic approach to being the latest Salinger. As Alice secludes herself in a seaside cottage for much of the novel, though occasionally jetting off to Paris for a book tour, it’s easy to understand the tug-of-war that has been the life of celebrity novelists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Would Rooney’s fans actually be impressed with the comparison to Salinger? Would they even consider being the next Salinger a compliment? With what we know now of Salinger’s not-so-private life, the answer is probably not. And that’s all more reason to end the tradition.

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Read the rest at The Curator ...