https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/21/is-being-the-voice-of-a-generation-a-curse-or-an-honour-for-novelists

From F Scott Fitzgerald to JD Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis to Sally Rooney, this label has been applied to countless zeitgeisty coming-of-age novels. But is it helpful?

Sally Rooney doesn’t come across as someone who spends a lot of time on Snapchat. There is no scene in her 2018 novel Normal People where her protagonists Marianne and Connell bond over the camera filter that turns your face into a dog. The characters in her debut, Conversations With Friends (2017), mostly communicate by text. Nevertheless, the label “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” – apparently dreamed up by an editor at Faber – surfaces in every article about the Irish author. Including this one.

It would be dishonest to pretend it doesn’t serve a purpose. Addictive apps are associated with millennials, much in the same way as scary drugs or outlandish musical genres were with earlier generations. JD Salinger’s coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) made him the archetypal “voice of a generation” – and even if the coolly detached prose of Normal People seems at odds with Holden Caulfield’s overt anger, Rooney’s characters are no less preoccupied with phoniness. Connell, the idealised working-class hero, studies English because “there it is: literature moves him”. Only, when he arrives at Trinity College, Dublin, he discovers that his richer classmates use books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. “Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money.”