this whole ennui-chilada
i was feeling a bit of ennui. now i want an enchilada
posted by HearHere at 1:10 AM on July 29, 2024 [7 favorites]

'Blerg', they texted.
'Blurgh dym?' their friend responded.
(cont.)
posted by parmanparman at 1:27 AM on July 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

And now: the sound of John Denver being strangled: You came on my pillow ... WAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH! Number Three - The Larch
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:37 AM on July 29, 2024 [10 favorites]

it doesnt mean much, but i will admit im a bit proud to have set myself up for Midlife Crisis Classic instead of Crisis Plus
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 3:56 AM on July 29, 2024 [8 favorites]

I appreciated that more than one book mentioned in the article dealt with family health issues. As the author said,

Is it still a ¡°midlife crisis¡± if it¡¯s happening outside your head?

By virtue of my job, I work closely with a number of financially-privileged millennials. Software engineers, marketing professionals, product managers. When you get to know them, a lot of them are in crisis, but none of the ones I know are dealing with ennui or buying sports cars for fun. They¡¯re almost all caring for aging family members with crushing health issues, with an extra side helping of supporting siblings or kids with long COVID.

(As I said, these folks are financially privileged. So they¡¯re not losing homes or going hungry while they deal with those issues, and plenty of folks are. But they¡¯re going into debt and losing sleep, so it still kinda sucks.)

It¡¯s hard (for me) to tell if the different flavor of crisis is because the world has gotten harder and support is less available. Or if it was just always like this, and the older tales of mid-life ennui just made for better novels than worrying over two parents with cancer.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 4:05 AM on July 29, 2024 [25 favorites]

It¡¯s hard (for me) to tell if the different flavor of crisis is because the world has gotten harder and support is less available. Or if it was just always like this, and the older tales of mid-life ennui just made for better novels than worrying over two parents with cancer.

I think there¡¯s part of this following the hollowing out of the middle class (higher costs, wages lagging productivity, fewer pensions, fewer kids caring for more adults, etc.) but I¡¯m also reminded that you used to have more people who died quickly ¨C not just in dangerous workplaces but also simply things like car crashes or now-manageable conditions. Our technical capacity to extend life has expanded faster than our societal capacity to value it.
posted by adamsc at 4:23 AM on July 29, 2024 [36 favorites]

Thank you for this post, chavenet. Good stuff.

There's a lot going on in this essay, and a lot left out--because, of course, one has to focus on some things and not others. The biggest absence is visible to me in its consequences, in terms of ahistorically rare wealth and privilege in 20th century America, particularly for white men outside of the elite. Cheever is meaningless without the social mobility that put people into a certain position to worry about what to do with status and wealth, novel for people from their background, and the wealth that made it possible. We are living after the boom of the 20th century, and I can't see that kind of security coming back, apart from major social changes or unexpected new sources of wealth. Of course classic midlife crises (and books about them) are going to be less common.

¡°Plotless treadmill diary of a 30-something artist-class white Brooklynite who was born into what she unrealistically thought was a safer, more forgiving world.¡± Is this way harsh, Tai? Yes. But this language can describe a canon. The sense and sensibility of thirty and fortysomethings, on the edge.

This essay does not meaningfully address the increasing solipsism of NYC-centric fiction in a distributed world. Nor does it address the impact of having thousands and thousands of people in the U.S. who have gotten graduate degrees focused around writing prose fiction. There are whole schools of criticism (e.g. the sociological criticism that came in for discussion here the other day) that talk about what contemporary U.S. fiction elevates and why it does that, and I'm glad that worlds and lives are often depicted now that weren't in past. That doesn't mean that talking about what's prominent in fiction now without talking about the wealth, privilege and obsessions of middle-to-upper-class MFA-havers, in Brooklyn or otherwise, isn't ignoring the forest for the trees. Or, at least, ignoring one forest for another.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:50 AM on July 29, 2024 [9 favorites]

i was feeling a bit of ennui. now i want an enchilada

Efficiently illustrates the commodity fetish, as only [exploited colonial food] can.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:10 AM on July 29, 2024 [4 favorites]

Becca Rothfeld's description of much contemporary prose style as ¡°a spare and serviceable mode, sort of IKEA-prose¡± gets at why I put down many books minutes after picking them up.
posted by kozad at 5:20 AM on July 29, 2024 [6 favorites]

What exactly am I supposed to have a midlife crisis about, my dissatisfaction with my home and spouse and child and professional life? This is not my beautiful house (because I don¡¯t own one and never will)
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:30 AM on July 29, 2024 [6 favorites]

So it used to be prep school bildungsromans and/or The Corrections et al, now it's Girls fanfic for the Hudson News set.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:38 AM on July 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

I've been thinking how my midlife crisis seems to be sort of in reverse.

Instead of wanting to buy a sports car, quit my job, and sleep with younger women, I just really want to get a practical car, maybe a second job, and find someone my age to spend the rest of my life with.
posted by Flaffigan at 8:26 AM on July 29, 2024 [11 favorites]

I haven't read any of these novels but they're all about women... did they used to call it a midlife crisis novel when it was about a woman, or did they call it something else?
posted by subdee at 8:26 AM on July 29, 2024 [6 favorites]

I thought this was a sharp and incisive essay, but I stumbled a bit here

¡°If you buy this categorization, it follows that the crisis is a necessarily classed experience. Its first fictive iterations conjure Cheever characters, gazing hard at their navels or into glasses of scotch. (Because heavy is the head that wins the bread!) In this light, it¡¯s plausible the crisis is subject-bound. Perhaps because middle class, heteronormative arrangements breed a specific kind of despair.¡±

John Cheever is such a dissonant example, because the social mores of his times forced him to hide his queerness, and I¡¯ve long suspected he had survivor¡¯s guilt because he was transferred out of his infantry company to stateside job in the army, and his company was largely wiped out on D-Day.

He¡¯s not especially unique in having been profoundly shaped by war and repression, and I can¡¯t help but read the ennui-lit of that era as being an emanation of the wider trauma of that time, influenced by Hemingway, who himself was deeply repressed and traumatized by an earlier war. This is not to say today¡¯s American writer has it easy, but rather that Cheever is very much the product of his era, and his writing conjures up that reality to me.

That said, I think Allen¡¯s broader point is correct, we have a new iteration of a type of literature that goes back at least to the middle of the 20th century, which explores what it¡¯s like to feel unmoored in society. I¡¯ve also been struck by the number of stories being told these days about dealing with the death of a loved one. Personally, and to echo what adamsc said above, I think it¡¯s because a loved one dying puts the iniquities and failures of modern society in sharp relief, and therefore almost demands writing about.

When lots of writers find themselves pressed into writing about the same issue, that is usually because it¡¯s something that is pressing in society. Society is failing the dying, and especially the ones who take care of the dying, and therefore it¡¯s absolutely to be expected that this is a topic that many artists find themselves tackling.
posted by Kattullus at 8:31 AM on July 29, 2024 [12 favorites]

One thing I've noticed in contemporary literary criticism is that it engages with text using some of the tropes of film criticism. It's a welcome consequence of flattening high and low art into just "art."

Occasionally things get lost. To me, the essential quality separating novels from film is that the novel requires you to place *yourself* into each character in order to flesh out the world, while films (especially when watching from a privileged perch) expect respectful detachment. Sympathy, not empathy, lest you become the next person to think it doesn't matter who plays who.

The novel is just different technology. It's not possible to read one with respectful detachment, you are a co-creator.

As such, I think contemporary criticism of the tedium and ubiquitousness of middle class white ennui misses a far more interesting point -- that the novel would appear to support a much more *aspirational* desire to have such problems.

In my view, whether most admit to it (or are even aware), there is a kind of desire expressed in continually reading the stories of people with smaller "crises" than your own.
posted by mathjus at 8:38 AM on July 29, 2024 [9 favorites]

I think the intense market focus of publishing Has created a snake-eating-its-own-ass situation in which the largest market segment for literary fiction is Brooklyn artist-class solipsists, so that¡¯s who the books are made for, which shrinks the readership outside of us Brooklyn artist-class solipsists, which further guarantee that¡¯s the only market segment which gets written for or about.

This is also a function of the fact that ¡°writer¡± isn¡¯t really a job Millenials can have the way previous generations could hone their craft as journeyman journalists and essayists¡ªwhat outlets offered for listicles and content aggregation wasn¡¯t enough to pay rent in Cleveland let alone Brooklyn. Thus it¡¯s a very few people to holding onto literary novels as an In-group marker of a certain type of intellectual elitism and who have the cushion to do the work needed to get good who make it.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:51 AM on July 29, 2024 [10 favorites]

One note on TFA:

Per the Pew Research Center, ¡°Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 [ages 28 to 48 in 2024] is considered a Millennial.¡±

That is incorrect. The age range is 28 to 43.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:54 AM on July 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

The most-stressed Millennials have been granted 5 extra years of age out of cruel caprice. That¡¯s how things are going.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:58 AM on July 29, 2024 [16 favorites]

Yeah, I feel like it's telling that when I read fiction in The New Yorker, the subjects are either moneyed people whose class privilege is only visible if you pay attention (because it's unremarkable to the author) or the desperately poor. I don't see a lot of stories about middle class people.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:58 AM on July 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

> I don't see a lot of stories about middle class people.

My brother and I got in a debate about who constitutes "Elite" -- in the context of the book 'Elite Capture,' which describes a process by which potentially powerful change is neutered by, well, elite capture.

The debate centered around whether we were ourselves 'elite.' While we're not wealthy, we do live in proximity to wealth and are gainfully employed. We do not own property, but in a decade or so we will probably be able to, possibly in our high COL area or quite probably somewhere smarter/more affordable. (He is smarter than me.)

His position was mostly that the super-powerful-wealthy class have made it impossible for almost any of us to have any measure of freedom -- that we are simply doing capital's bidding, and that if you're doing anything for capital, you are not "Elite."

In that conception, there really isn't a middle class. There's just the 1 percent and everyone else. It doesn't surprise me that if you see things that way, every short story that isn't about being "desperately poor" will seem instead to be about the concerns of the petty bourgeosie, no need to mention money.

I think this speaks a LOT more to the shifting concept of the middle class than to its disappearance. My brother is plainly right in some ways. He and I both are landed gentry with no land -- raised to be part of "elite overproduction" (read: educated) but without the economic means to deploy any "noblesse oblige." We are working people supporting ourselves, who happen to be armed with the critical toolkit that used to be reserved for richer folk.

*This class of person* is almost certainly the class that these novels describe, if not the class that consume them. (Like I said before, I think there's a wider audience than most think.)

To put it bluntly, these stories ARE about middle class people, economically speaking. But two things have changed: first, middle class people can no longer really consider themselves seperately from an enormous, often disenfranchised but connected Global South -- and second, the modern middle class person has the education and information access of the rich. Which means they adopt some of their neuroses, but certainly not their wealth.
posted by mathjus at 9:45 AM on July 29, 2024 [17 favorites]

What I don't see in the debate is the irony of how the burden for taking care of a dying older parent/grandparent often inadvertently falls on people who are themselves the least secure/fulfilled because they don't have a career or a family or a social life and how that only exacerbates the feeling of being unmoored.

Around the time my grandmother's health began declining, a lot of my older cousins were settling into careers, buying houses, and having children. The burden of taking care of her thus fell on those of us who were unencumbered by those things and had the "privilege" of being able to show up in the middle of the day for meals or spending weekends cleaning bathrooms or sleeping over during particularly bad bouts of c.diff. I was always more available to do things than everyone else because I wasn't really living my own life.

I loved my grandmother and I love my family, but I'm still a little salty about that time period.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:22 AM on July 29, 2024 [20 favorites]

While we're not wealthy, we do live in proximity to wealth and are gainfully employed. We do not own property, but in a decade or so we will probably be able to, possibly in our high COL area or quite probably somewhere smarter/more affordable.

No offense, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. It's fine that you identify with the moneyed class you live near. The question is, though: do they identify with you?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:43 AM on July 29, 2024 [6 favorites]

I've been thinking how my midlife crisis seems to be sort of in reverse.

Yes, the Suburban Pit Of Despair has been filled, and replaced with an exciting variety of unpredictable rusty implements on double pendulums. ¡°Oh no my stable pensioned job is soul crushing and I find the maintenance on my house I can afford with one income¡± isn¡¯t really as relatable as it used to be.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:10 PM on July 29, 2024 [9 favorites]

The problem with asking about Millenial mid-life crisis that millennials statistically own homes and have incomes completely commisurate with other generations (except for Gen-X - millennials are economically kicking Gen-X's butt), and coupled with the idea that millennials have more money and more education, they all have the trappings of 'mid life crisis' as just standard life items now. Expensive cars with fast acceleration? Check. Vanity medical procedures have come down in cost, but check, homes and wild vacations? check. Affairs? Check. That's not to say there are aren't poor millennials, but they are not poorer relative to other generations at the same age.


What is the millennial mid life crisis? That's got to be defined first, and maybe by fiction authors, but more by actual millennials deciding what they want their regular life isn't delivering.

Also, caring for elderly infirm relatives isn't new to millennials, but rather the downside of life that only a certain subset whose relatives need endless longterm care get to experience.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:15 PM on July 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

His position was mostly that the super-powerful-wealthy class have made it impossible for almost any of us to have any measure of freedom -- that we are simply doing capital's bidding, and that if you're doing anything for capital, you are not "Elite."


I'm sorry but this is just a silly definition. The more capital you have, the more you are performing capital's bidding. If 'elite' meant "freedom" then Elon Musk would be retired. So would Donald Trump. 'Elites' want things besides capital too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:20 PM on July 29, 2024 [2 favorites]

The problem with asking about Millenial mid-life crisis that millennials statistically own homes and have incomes completely commisurate with other generations (except for Gen-X - millennials are economically kicking Gen-X's butt),

Huh?

Millennial Homeownership Still Lagging Behind Previous Generations

Also, caring for elderly infirm relatives isn't new to millennials, but rather the downside of life that only a certain subset whose relatives need endless longterm care get to experience.

Must be awfully nice living the kind of privileged life you seem to enjoy.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:29 PM on July 29, 2024 [7 favorites]

[Struggling] Brooklyn artist-class solipsist

Well, darnit, there goes another good sockpuppet name.
posted by k3ninho at 3:05 PM on July 29, 2024 [4 favorites]

This line of inquiry points us back to the real middle of the diagram here: the unbearable whiteness of being.

Dangfoibles, I can't now use "unbearable whiteness of being."
posted by k3ninho at 3:22 PM on July 29, 2024 [2 favorites]

Must be awfully nice living the kind of privileged life you seem to enjoy.

I think you misunderstand me. A lot of parents die right away, they don't have protracted issues with dementia or long-term completely disabling physical ailments.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:35 PM on July 30, 2024 [3 favorites]