Word: fictionalized
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...novel is getting more user-friendly in general. Fun and profundity are no longer mutually exclusive. Humor is back: Smith and Shteyngart are satirists, Foer and Mitchell are wits. Likewise, vigorous, plotty storytelling is in vogue again. For much of the 20th century the border between high and low fiction was diligently policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with heavy irony...
...Douglas Coupland (who published Generation X in 1991), the last novelist who on a moonless night could be taken for the V.O.A.G., the trail goes cold. Not quite abruptly--for a few twinkly, magical minutes interest swirled around Wallace, and Eggers (more for his memoir than his fiction), and Chuck Palahniuk--but, ultimately, definitively...
...maybe there never was such an animal in the first place. 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. Look at the heroes of the iconic books of those previous eras: Jake Barnes, Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty--bad seeds and square pegs, all of them. The paradox of every Voice novel is that it brings a generation of readers together around the idea that they alone...
That probably gets at some of the truth of it. The world has changed, and the novel has changed with it. Fictional characters just can't get away with being generically white and middle class and male anymore, the way they used to. Not and still be the object of mass identification and adoration the way the Voice has traditionally been. We just don't think about people that way anymore: we're interested in the specifics of their racial and ethnic and historical circumstances, where they came from and who made them that way. If the novelists under...
...will probably never again come together around a single book the way they did in the 20th century, when Holden Caulfield went looking for the ducks in Central Park. Those birds have flown. It's hard not to miss that old sense of unanimity. Even if it was a fiction, it was a pleasant, comforting...