Cynical Literature, Unaffected Crowds

Written by Ledya Khamou

The sight of Dymocks’ adult fiction section is all too familiar: Cynical millennial fic and award-winning short story collections plague the bookshelves. The covers are all bright, in primary colours, as if marketed to kindergarteners, with corporate-style animated figures or anatomical slices of a mouth, an ear, an eye, on the foreground. Thin spines, rarely reaching over three hundred pages, with the titles toeing the line between pretentiousness and Buzzfeed-level attempts at relatability (There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Send Nudes, No Hard Feelings…). The stories are light enough to not waste your emotional currency, for which you are probably already running low. I have read some of these books, but I cannot recall any emotions that they stirred in me. They blur together, like pedestrians weaving dumbly as one amidst the blinking traffic lights, no distinguishable faces within the crowd.

To not completely depress myself, I gravitate towards the authors that have made me feel something. I linger in the ‘M’ section, searching for Moshfegh.

Ottessa Moshfegh writes characters for you to dislike. In Homesick for Another World, love-sick men stalk single mothers, carers call their mentally challenged patients slurs, and soon-to-be-fathers abandon their pregnant wives for a holiday. All the stories are backgrounded by the apathetic face of crumbling city infrastructure. In a cafe, you can be a pervert, wedged up by the window to people—watch, to lust over and criticise strangers in equal measure. It’s difficult to pretend that it matters. Moshfegh fits disturbing statements within ordinary sentences, the minimal, matter-of-fact syntax usurping the confessional nature of the admission. “Sometimes I stick my finger down my throat” is given the same importance as “I was always picking at my pimples”. The nonchalant tone forbids any epiphanous relief that may come from confession. It reminds me of seeing ancient cathedral structures refurbished for corporate office space, the sacred confessional defaced by an uncaring, atheist city. I want to shake my paperback until it says something true. Moshfegh, what do you even believe?

I witness the same indifference in my daily commutes, when a homeless man begs for spare change in the corner of a train carriage, promising “I’m gonna get clean this time, I’m gonna make it right”. But we, the passengers, are all suddenly preoccupied with our phones, or the windows displaying the passing grey slates of station after station, and he may as well have been a ghost. One woman silently hands him two gold coins, nodding dismissively at his gushing thanks, and turns her head toward the window—her chin is stoic, mouth unsmiling, as if she’s ashamed of her own kind gesture.

Millennial fic is an undemanding sub-genre. Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle is but a string of witty one-liners, a series of unstructured, everyday observations with no solutions, like a depressive scrapbook. Everything is tongue-in-cheek and ironic and ironically tongue-in-cheek, all of it funny and none of it making me laugh. With the trendy elimination of traditional formatting, such as quotation marks or chapter markers, style seems to be platformed to represent a sleek, aesthetical emptiness.

Of course, millennial fic can be excitingly subversive and cruelly blasé in its bluntness, like your beloved cat dropping a rat’s carcass at your feet, yet ultimately it is lazy. Its social commentary is limited and theoretical. Sally Rooney characters discuss communism in vaguely positive terms, smirking at each other like it’s an inside joke, Normal People’s Marianne joking about whether Connell would live in a matriarchy. After all, the nothingness which sets the thematic foundation of new adult fiction is a contrasting state to the anger which motivates revolutionary change. Rather, such nothingness is an entryway into plush, excusable complacency, similar to the urban blasé attitude.

Yet, is there a simple value in accurately reflecting our burnt-out, post-capitalist society, as the genre’s modernist and postmodernist predecessors did? I certainly did not read James Joyce’s Dubliners in search of moral solutions, so why should I assign millennial fic such a heavy burden? At the same time, the Melburnian streets are littered with protestors, a commotion of stampeding feet and rhythmic chants. In the silent aftermath, we wake to no legitimate change, the upper houses of government as cold and imposing as the city’s skyscrapers. Is it enough to merely see something horrible and point at it? Eventually, you need to do something about the dead rat stinking near your feet.

In Dymocks, I pay for a novel I recognise from social media as a popular “sad girl book”. On the tram, I hug the paper bag to my chest and hope that the book’s edges leave a mark through my clothes; I hope that it bruises the numbness.

Content Warnings: References to dysphoria, violence and suicide

bell-bottoms

Written by Wildes Lawler

i have learnt to twist the knife for the new holes in my leather belt. the bony bits of my waist (though they are like little shivs) are not enough to fit and hold up my bell-bottom jeans. and now the holidays are here, but still, they will all converge: the science teacher will perch me up on a sharp hook. the students will take notes on my giant limbs and pin-thin neck. they will not be able to distinguish between the teacher’s pointing stick and my sternum that weakens, caving with every wrong answer. and even when i hook myself (my bell-bottom jeans as my noose) they will look at me with pride, and say: “at least now they are held up.”