Time magazine writer Lev Grossman goes in search of the literary voice of America’s younger generation and comes up emptyhanded. Sure, he says, there’s a long list of promising 40-and-under novelists, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Curtis Sittenfeld to Dave Eggers to Colson Whitehead. And sure, there are even observable general trends, like shorter books and more experimenting with genre. But still, he can’t find a “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.”

Or perhaps he’s asking too much. We’re inclined to agree with Grossman when he admits, late in the piece, that “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.” Of course, if he’d arrived at that insight in the first paragraph, it would have been a much shorter article.

Related links:
Click here for the Time story on the voice of a generation