Who's the Voice of this Generation?

By Lev Grossman

David Foster Wallace is 44 years old. Jonathan Franzen is 46. Jonathan Lethem, 42. Michael Chabon, 43.

I point that out not to be rude--although I admit it is kind of rude--but because those are the writers that people--people who think about such things, anyway--think of as the young American novelists. And even by the notoriously elastic standards of the literary world--the only place on earth where you can still be a wunderkind at the age of 30--42 is not especially youthful. Wallace, Franzen, Lethem and Chabon may be great writers, but one thing they are not is young writers.

But if Wallace, Franzen et al. aren't the leading young novelists anymore, who are? It's not an idle question. The novel is one of the most vital cultural resources we have--a private, potent means of sharing the unspeakableness of daily life with one another. So it's only natural to wonder who's taking care of the novel--who's taking up the torch and where exactly they're taking it. Or whether it has gone out. The novel is one of the platforms from which the voice of a generation speaks. And if you listen closely, you'll start to wonder if the current generation has a voice at all.

It's not that there aren't any young novelists (for purposes of rough-'n'-ready generalization, let's say novelists under 40). At 39, Jhumpa Lahiri already has a powerful novel (The Namesake) and a Pulitzer-winning story collection. Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) has got a lot of attention both popular and critical, and he's only 29. A somewhat partisan sampling would also include Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist), 36; Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory), 37; Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity), 36; Arthur Phillips (Prague), 37; Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep), 30; Myla Goldberg (Bee Season), 34; Nicole Krauss (The History of Love), 31; and Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan), 33. If we open our borders to the Brits, we also get Zadie Smith (On Beauty), who at 30 is probably her generation's consensus No. 1 seed, as well as Monica Ali (Brick Lane), 39, and David Mitchell (Black Swan Green), 37. And there are dozens of young mid-list talents at work who don't get as much press but probably should. Keep an eye on the painfully funny Sam Lipsyte and the eerily fantastical Kelly Link.

Not only do young novelists exist, but we can even say a few things about what their books have in common. For example, they're getting shorter. Ten years ago novels were expanding rapidly, like little overheated primordial galaxies. Chunky, world-devouring tomes like Wallace's Infinite Jest and Franzen's The Corrections were supposed to be the wave of the future, as if the ominously burgeoning complexity and interconnectedness of contemporary reality demanded correspondingly fatter books to embrace them. Now, writers are more likely to immerse themselves in a single time and place, and at more portable lengths. The cosm has gone from macro- back down to micro-.

In fact, the novel is getting more user-friendly in general. Fun and profundity are no longer mutually exclusive. Humor is back: Smith and Shteyngart are satirists, Foer and Mitchell are wits. Likewise, vigorous, plotty storytelling is in vogue again. For much of the 20th century the border between high and low fiction was diligently policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with heavy irony," notes Lethem. "Now, a lot of writing has a very natural degree of engagement with the vernacular culture." Look at someone like Sittenfeld, whose Prep, a wildly readable account of a Midwestern girl floundering at an elite Eastern boarding school, became a surprise best seller. Is she a literary writer or a commercial writer? The distinction no longer seems to apply. She's just a good writer.

All that is lovely news for future students of 21st century literature. And yet: there's still no writer under 40 who makes you want to stand up in a crowded theater and shout, That right there is the voice of this generation, that is the yearning and the rage of the contemporary, embodied in some poor sad sack of a character who's mad as hell and just can't get no satisfaction. Every once in a while a novel comes along that makes everything else feel dated, that feels as current as tomorrow's e-mail, that gives readers the story of their own secret ineffable desperation with such immediacy that it induces spontaneous mass recognition as the Voice. Every once in a while--but not lately.

You can walk from the beginning of the 20th century, stepping safely from decade to decade, and find one writer after another anointed as the Voice. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis ... but once you get to Douglas Coupland (who published Generation X in 1991), the last novelist who on a moonless night could be taken for the V.O.A.G., the trail goes cold. Not quite abruptly--for a few twinkly, magical minutes interest swirled around Wallace, and Eggers (more for his memoir than his fiction), and Chuck Palahniuk--but, ultimately, definitively.

The process by which the Voice is anointed is a mysterious one. "I think youth has a lot to do with it," says Ellis, whose latest novel, Lunar Park, came out last summer. "Being the first--and not necessarily the best, just the first--to capture what it feels like to be a member of your generation catapults you forward in a direction that doesn't happen to Jonathan Safran Foer or Zadie Smith. I guess I got lucky, because the way I wrote about us was something that a large number of people connected and agreed with. It wasn't orchestrated. There wasn't a plan."

You could argue that the current crop of writers is still ripening. But how long does it take? Ellis was still in college when he wrote Less than Zero, a vivid, anhedonic portrait of wasted (in every sense) youth on the L.A. party circuit. Hemingway was only 27 when he published The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby at 28; Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 32. (Not that it really matters, but Goethe was just 25 when he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the first voice-of-a-generation novels, in 1774. It's not really the done thing now, but back then throughout Europe it was very hip to dress up like Werther in a blue coat and yellow trousers.)

It's quite possible that nobody wants to be the Voice anymore. It's "a great aggravation for anybody who has been selected," says Gary Fisketjon, vice president and editor at large at Knopf, who edits both Ellis and McInerney. "Writers are always speaking for themselves and not for a generation. I don't know if they want that responsibility. I think it's something that nobody would feel comfortable with unless the ego was completely untrammeled." At least one Voice emeritus has nothing but relief that his term is over. "I think the very idea is narcissistic," says Coupland, whose most recent novel (his 11th), JPod, is set at a video-game company. "I got stuck with the ridiculous label for a while because Generation X had the word generation in the title."

Are we simply living through a downturn, one of those periodic dead spots wherein the muses take a smoke break? Has the country's artistic talent been siphoned off by sexier, better-paying media with bigger audiences? (TV has been suspiciously good lately.) Or could the professionalization of "creative writing," in the form of scores of M.F.A. programs, actually be retarding the progress of contemporary literature--hammering eccentric geniuses into workshop-style conformity, then drowning them out by handing diplomas to their mediocre peers by the bushel?

Or maybe there never was such an animal in the first place. The voice of a generation could just be a convenient fiction, propagated by academics looking for dissertation topics, publicists looking for publicity and (surely not) book critics looking for a headline. On some level it has always been an absurdity. Look at the heroes of the iconic books of those previous eras: Jake Barnes, Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty--bad seeds and square pegs, all of them. The paradox of every Voice novel is that it brings a generation of readers together around the idea that they alone are the single badass misfit truth teller in a world full of phonies.

Note also that every single one of the writers to bear the title has been both white and male. Whose generation are they speaking for, exactly? "When people say generation, they're usually not including, say, people who live in Africa, Asia and people without bank accounts," Coupland says tartly. "It's an exclusionary and delusional concept."

That probably gets at some of the truth of it. The world has changed, and the novel has changed with it. Fictional characters just can't get away with being generically white and middle class and male anymore, the way they used to. Not and still be the object of mass identification and adoration the way the Voice has traditionally been. We just don't think about people that way anymore: we're interested in the specifics of their racial and ethnic and historical circumstances, where they came from and who made them that way. If the novelists under 40 have a shared preoccupation, it is--to put it as dryly as possible--immigration. They write about characters who cross borders, from East to West, from Old World to New and back again, and the many and varied tolls they pay along the way. Their shared project, to the extent that they have one, is the revision of the good old American immigrant narrative, bringing it up to code with the realities of our multicultural, transcontinental, hyphenated identities and our globalized, displaced, deracinated lives. It's a literature of multiplicity and diversity, not one of unanimity, and it makes the idea of a unifying voice of a generation seem rather quaint and 20th century. I may love and empathize with the transplanted Bengalis who populate Lahiri's fiction, or Shteyngart's semi-Americanized Russians, or Foer's uprooted Old Worlders or Smith's international extended families. But I would never be so foolish as to mistake any of them for myself.

The fact is, a generation of readers will probably never again come together around a single book the way they did in the 20th century, when Holden Caulfield went looking for the ducks in Central Park. Those birds have flown. It's hard not to miss that old sense of unanimity. Even if it was a fiction, it was a pleasant, comforting one.

But we'll get over it. Isn't the whole point of literature to transcend its moment--not to get mired in the transient woes of a particular generation? "Let's not forget that the voice of a generation does not equal the best writer of a generation," Ellis points out with admirable perspective. "And the best novels of my generation are not generational novels. The Corrections, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Fortress of Solitude ... they can't really be classified as that." Listen for the singular voice of the current generation, and you'll hear something else, something different: multiple voices, singing not in unison, but in harmony.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs