The Millennial Novel Comes of (Middle) Age

The most screwed-over generation has taken over American fiction

In 2019 I worked what I have to assume will be my last job where I went to an office five days a week and served as an editor for a website. I say that it’s likely my last gig of that kind mostly because those jobs aren’t really available these days, and given the state of media, I don’t know if I’d want to go back even if I didn’t have bigger responsibilities at home. I enjoyed the job, and one of the things I did while there that I had the most fun with was putting together a package of stories on the millennials approaching middle-age. At the time, we were still a few years out from the most geriatric of the generation hitting their 40s, but I found the idea fascinating since the media had spent the last 10-15 years treating anybody born between 1981-1996 (that’s what the U.S. Census and Pew put the age range at, not me) like children, yet they were the ones who were being made to deal with basically every mess made by the people that raised them. There they were, in their 30s, on the precipice of being officially old.

I’m not trying to sound mean when I say that. The thing is that I’ve had a rare window into the rise of the millennial given that I was born in 1980, the year before they started arriving on the scene. I’ve said many times before how I’m technically Gen. X, and yeah, all my cultural references and a lot of my outlook was influenced by that generation, but I also think people in my age group are our own thing that I usually refer to as Carter Babies. I’m a decade or two younger than most of the people on the cover of this week’s T magazine featuring Gen. X as “The Greatest Generation,” but I also didn’t understand or feel much kinship with just about anything that was considered a millennial touchstone, either. For instance, I’ve never seen Garden State. I also, mercifully, never did the Harlem Shake. Somebody gave me one of those BuzzFeed “LOL” stickers and I told them to fuck off. I lived in Williamsburg and called it “over” by about 2005, which is why I always considered the whole “indie sleaze” revivalist history thing bunk since most of it takes from the latter part of the decade.

Yes, all of this sounds like typical Gen. X cynicism, and I won’t deny that. Yet the darker truth is that a lot of my resentment came purely from jealousy: I was just a year shy of being a millennial, yet when I started seeing that generation begin its ascendance, I felt left out. I felt old and lame by 30. It wasn’t a good feeling, and it was one I decided to explore and get over, remembering that the whole generation thing is mostly dumb, and time is a great equalizer. We all end up aging and I decided it was better that I try and do it with some dignity instead of becoming some bitter old jerk. What I eventually came to feel was sympathy for millennials (and pretty much anybody else younger than me) because—I don’t know if you’ve read this one before—but our elders really left a big mess that some of them are content with still contributing to. For all the talk of personal trauma that we’ve been better at sharing over the last decade, we tend to gloss over how people who were born between 1981 and 1996 are all part of a traumatized generation. Gen. X might be the last that came of age before the Internet, but millennials also are old enough to recall those days. They were around before 9/11, the surveillance state, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, iphone addiction, the loneliness epidemic, Clinton’s cloying neoliberalism, Trump’s Idiocracy, Putin and Netanyahu’s reigns of terror, Covid lockdown, A.I. slop, and whatever other modern addition to our current hellscape you want to tack on there. Yet, we treated them like a test subject, a group of people who “killed” everything. If anybody in their 30s or 40s is feeling particularly stunted or stuck in some sort of arrested development these days, I tend to feel sympathy for them given all of that.

Millennial fiction has also hit middle age. What I mean by that is over the last few years I read a few novels that showed people who “grew up online” are just as confused and alienated as the rest of us by the modern world (Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Bryan Washington’s Memorial are two standouts), and they’re in the best position to try and make some sense out of whatever the hell is going on. In 2025, two of the novels that stuck around in my head the longest were ones that focused on millennial malaise, but ended up feeling universal no matter what age you are: Jeremy Gordon’s See Friendship and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection.

It’s probably not easy to recognize at first. Gordon is an American writer, Latronico’s book was translated from Italian. Gordon’s focuses on a 30-something guy in media who falls down a rabbit hole trying to piece together what really happened involving a friend’s death, and Latronico wrote about Tom and Anna, Italian expats living in Germany. See Friendship is an accidental detective novel with loss and grief at the center of it; Perfection is almost like a modern Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, where you can see the way things are going, that if everything isn’t already lost for the couple, then maybe it was never there to begin with. Gordon’s novel made me chuckle because of his wit, while the way Latronico set things up made me cringe and laugh at the same time the same way some of the best modern comedy makes me feel. Yet without being too somber, both books perfectly captured the loneliness of everyday life, and See Friendship and Perfection also highlighted perfectly how chained to the internet we’ve become.

Besides being centered around people from the same age group, the thing that tied See Friendship and Perfection together for me was something that wasn’t even in either of the novels: it’s this sense that the world is passing the characters by, and they are quickly realizing they don’t know their places in it as well as they may have, that all the scrolling and learning stuff from podcasts or YouTube videos isn’t really filling them with the happiness or fulfillment they want. It’s the unknown future that made me think so much about these two books after I read them in 2025. Both books feel particularly modern, but there was something about the fact that Gordon’s Jacob and the couple in Perfection all make their money off jobs provided by this current era of Internet that had me thinking about the longer story of these fictional characters we aren’t privy to. They’re all trying to figure something out, hoping to get some slice of the life they had sold to them by adults, the media, and algorithm. Yet, as the characters in Gordon and Latronico’s novels both find out—in the words of Gen. X icon Fiona Apple—this world is bullshit. They’ve been sold lots of lies, and the one good thing they’ve got going is they’re fictional characters, so their stories ends when we close the book. Unfortunately, for those of us in the real world, we have to keep going into a very murky future, uncertain what it will look like ten, five, even a single year from now. That’s why these two novels in this particular yet felt like a nice reminder that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to being confused and unhappy with the future we inherit day after day.

Note: The original version of this identified Latronico’s characters as American expats when they are actually from Italy. My mistake! I honestly missed that part and they reminded me of Americans I know. Oops.