The author's highly anticipated debut novel arrives just in time to assure the literary establishment that twenty-somethings aren't just chronically aloof. They are, in fact, executing a high-wire act of metaphysical theater.
NEW YORK—It is a profound, albeit exhausting, relief to discover that the youth are not merely vacant, but are in fact engaged in a high-wire act of metaphysical theater, at least according to Madeline Cash, whose debut novel arrives to salvage the reputations of the chronically disaffected.
Cash’s project—a work that treats the act of sending a slightly detached text message with the sort of crushing solemnity usually reserved for the sealing of the Magna Carta—answers a desperate, unspoken plea from critics who require an academic framework to explain why the twenty-somethings in their lives are so incredibly difficult to speak with at dinner parties. We are instructed by the downtown literary apparatus that Cash is not merely playing around; rather, she is actively interrogating the boundaries of the self, suggesting that the inability to express a genuine emotion without wrapping it in three layers of protective irony is not a developmental failure, but rather the vanguard of contemporary letters.
To truly grasp the magnitude of what is being attempted here—and one must forgive the lay reader for missing the nuances of such a delicate operation—one must look back to the paralyzing, interior inertia of Flaubert’s L'Éducation sentimentale; though, naturally, Flaubert’s protagonist had the distinct advantage of suffering his ennui without the persistent, ambient glow of a smartphone screen flattening his despair into a brand aesthetic. It is a lineage of disaffection that traces its way through the centuries, finding its most acute, if criminally underread, expression in the breathless, fragmented prose of 1970s Uruguayan structuralist poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose meditations on the artifice of the garden mirror Cash's own obsession with the curated self. Yet, to chart this genealogy accurately requires an acknowledgment of less exalted, though perhaps more pertinent, texts; indeed, Cash’s structural commitment to characters who refuse to grow, learn, or mean anything they say borrows heavily, almost aggressively, from the narrative architecture of the 1998 Furby instruction manual.
It takes a staggering degree of authorial confidence to look upon a cohort whose primary mode of engagement is the reaction GIF and declare them the undisputed inheritors of the Western dramatic tradition, yet this is precisely the sleight of hand Cash manages to execute, provided you are willing to grade on a steep, generational curve.
What we are witnessing is the absolute dismantling of the archaic, oppressive notion that a person should be expected to mean the things they say, which is honestly so restrictive when you think about it in a post-structural context.
We are, it seems, expected to read the profound emptiness of Cash’s protagonists as a devastating mirror reflecting our own societal decay, an inversion of the classical tragedy wherein the fatal flaw is not hubris, but rather a catastrophic lack of interesting hobbies; it is a world where the stakes are simultaneously non-existent and apocalyptic, a paradox that the author navigates by simply having her characters refuse to acknowledge them entirely. This, the literati assure us, is the very definition of a generational voice: one that speaks at great length, utilizing all the available tools of modern syntax, to ensure that absolutely nothing of substance is ever inadvertently conveyed.