From F Scott Fitzgerald to JD Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis to Sally Rooney, this description has been applied to countless zeitgeisty coming-of-age fictions. But is it helpful?
Sally Rooney doesn’t come across as someone who spends a good deal of epoch on Snapchat. There is no scene in her 2018 story Normal People where her protagonists Marianne and Connell bond over the camera filter that turns your face into a pup. The references in her debut, Conversations With Friends( 2017 ), chiefly communicate by textbook. Nevertheless, the label “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”- apparently dreamed up by an journalist at Faber- skin-deeps in all articles about the Irish author. Including this one.
It would be dishonest to profess it doesn’t suffice a purpose. Addictive apps are associated with millennials, much in the same way as scary remedies or outlandish musical genres were with earlier generations. JD Salinger’s coming-of-age romance TheCatcher in the Rye( 1951) represented him the archetypal “voice of a generation”- and even if the coolly separated prose of Normal People seems at odds with Holden Caulfield’s overt anger, Rooney’s attributes are no less preoccupied with phoniness. Connell, the idealised working-class hero, studies English because “there it is: literature moves him”. Exclusively, when he arrives at Trinity College, Dublin, he discovers that his richer classmates exert journals chiefly as a room of materializing cultured. “Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his volume truly was insightful, all works were ultimately marketed as status typifies, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry realized money.”
Read more: theguardian.com
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