Donna Tartt, The Secret History: “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
Gerrard Winstanley, The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced: “And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.”1
Over the past decade or so, this weird thing kept happening. I’d read (or watch, or hear) something particularly amazing, search up the creator, and find that they were born uncannily close to me: sometimes within a few years, sometimes even within a few months. It happened in real life, too. I’d meet someone awesome, check their face, and ask their year of birth. The more often this happened, the more I started to think that there was, indeed, something particularly salient about my micro-generation: some unique historical niche we occupied. I narrowed the timeframe down to the birth-years 1977 to 1983, and came up with a name for my hypothesis. I called it The Hinge Theory. This phrase arose from the feeling that my cohort stood in a stress-point between two planes of existence, with one foot in the past and one in the future: neither here nor there but in between, uncomfortably straddling the abyss.
I’d been riffing on this idea for years, but nobody had ever told me it was already a thing.2 Then last Thursday at the pub (four ciders down on account of my birthday the week before— everyone was buying me drinks) I was unfolding my theory to my new friend Andy,3 and he goes “Oh— you mean Xennials?”4
Me: “What?”
Andy: “You know, in between Gen X and Millennials.“5
Later, when I looked the word up, it turned out that, yep, that was exactly what I meant. (Whatever brilliant thought you might have about how things are, some cunning sociologist has got there first.) Had I been living under a rock?6 How had I managed to miss the successive waves of news stories on the Xennial, the first in 2014 when writer Sarah Stankorb coined the term; again in 2017 when sociologist Dan Woodman brought it back into the spotlight; and then in 2021, when the word Xennial was added to the Oxford English Dictionary— a marker of mainstream usage if ever there was one?7
But— let’s rewind the cassette tape a little, to all those years when I didn’t know it was an actual named phenomenon. It was like my brain-radio was tuned to this certain station. It got so I could tell when someone was going to fall into that age-range, by… Something. Tone? Subject? Humour? Hard to say. Why were all these spicy takes coming out of the mouths of my close peers? (Or was it just group-narcissism that made me think we were so super-special?) What was the nature of this mysterious, indefinable Hinge quality— what was its cause?
We don’t need to look too far for reasons. The obvious, obvious, big bloody obvious difference between the formative years of my youth and those same crucible years for the people following after is… the Internet, yo; or rather, the lack of it. I figured this was the key. We Hinge-Dwellers were the youngest people to remember life before the digital age. Omnipresent cellphones8 and Internet access came about in our late teens, when we’d already had a good chunk of experience of landlines etc.9 It turns out there’s a snappy name for that phenomenon, too: Digital Immigrants. Those born before the early 80s are considered Digital Immigrants— people who grew up before the ubiquity of the Internet.10 One way to look at it, then, is that Xennials are the youngest refugees from the old world.
(Another socioeconomic factor I pinpointed more recently is the parallel between the lifespan of Xennials and the dominance of über-Neoliberalism that solidified in our very early childhoods— Thatcher, Reagan,11 etc., not to mention what happened here in Aotearoa in the mid-80s;12 unlike those older than us, we haven’t known a world before ubiquitous corporate rule.)13
The aforementioned Dan Woodman, sociologist, irritated by people over-simplifying his ideas, says we have to be careful about generational pigeon-holing: “No generation should be characterised as if they have one personality type, with a single set of dispositions and attitudes, even if it is nice. Verging on astrology,14 this type of generational research is increasingly challenged.”
Some of the articles I came across on t’Internet about Xennials were couched in the manner of, like, How to most effectively exploit Xennials in the workplace. They seemed to imply that this betwixt-and-between quality was a good thing. Sage HR Blog says: “The Xennials possess the cynicism Gen Xers are known for and the relentless drive and optimism of today's Millennials.” It doesn’t feel that way to me, though, like a tidy synthesis of the generations, like cross-bred hybrid vigour. It feels awful, like a psychic ache. Kev has a coinage for this feeling: timesickness. Not quite nostalgia; I parse it as something more like the lived experience of anachronism.
A disclaimer: I’m writing this through a head-cold. (Always interesting to try doing things in different states of mind.) During first lockdown, I found myself stranded without enough books, and since then I’ve relaxed my former ban on book-buying15 and have been slowly acquiring a tidy little library, by means of coming across things in op shops for a few bucks, and occasionally by dipping into Pegasus and Bookhound.16
You know when you’re sick and want to comfort-read? Although I normally read non-fiction, comfort-reading requires immersion in a fictional world. I have an unfortunate problem with novels, though: my standards are too high. I’m a perfectionist of fiction and that makes me conservative. I’m reluctant to invest hours in trying out something new. (I know, I know, I miss out on a lot that way, and often come to amazing pieces of work sometimes years after the fact. Perils of contrarianism.) Anyway, when I’m sick I want to read something I’ve read before, something that I know will do the magic trick of taking me away from all this hideousness. There are a number of novels that I’ve read dozens of times, so that I’ve learnt them. I know when I begin the sentence where it will end, and yet somehow the magic never rubs off. Infinitely deep: that’s my definition of a perfect novel.17
In the middle of the night I roamed my shelves and settled upon what is probably the most unlikely of my all-time favourites: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. (I once gave this book to fellow bibliophile Richard for his birthday, and he found it weird and disturbing, which it is— but it’s also amazing.) Very briefly, it concerns a murder non-mystery18 that takes place at a liberal arts college in Vermont, among a group of rich, eccentric Classics students.
In reading it this time, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the dedication to Bret Easton Ellis. That caused me to do some digging into the origins of the book, which I’d never done, maybe because of a superstitious wish to preserve the mystery of its power over me. I didn’t have any knowledge of Tartt aside from a vague impression of dark hair.19 I quickly discovered that Ellis and Tartt were classmates at the same liberal arts college in Vermont— Bennington; and that both The Secret History and Ellis’ first two novels, Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, are set in or with reference to Bennington, which Tartt fictionalises as Hampden, and Ellis as Camden. (Ellis’ Less Than Zero was published when he was 21 and still a student at Bennington: it made him instantly rich and famous. It was the 80s— literature could make you an overnight it-boy. Tartt’s equally smash-hit novel came out when she was 29, its path smoothed by her friendship with Ellis.)
The Secret History, it turns out, is based not only upon a real place, but upon real people, with most of the main characters drawing heavily upon Tartt’s real-life friends and teachers at Bennington. (See: Lili Anolik: The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College.) For some reason— maybe because of the foreignness of the setting and characters to me— I’d thought the novel was pure fantasy, woven from the stuff of imagination. It made me uneasy to see photos of these people, to realise that Tartt did the thing most young writers do, and wrote literally what she knew; real life thinly veiled. Richard Papen, the protagonist, is something of a male version of Tartt herself. His parents have the same jobs as hers, and even though he’s from California rather than her native Mississippi, he— like her at Bennington— is a person of modest origins who finds himself in the midst of the children of the ultra-rich.
The character of Julian Morrow in The Secret History is said to be based on the eccentric Bennington classics professor, Claude Fredericks. Tartt herself denies this, possibly because her portrayal of Julian / Claude is ultimately unflattering: “The twinkle in Julian’s eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.”
Fredericks is notable for his eight-decade, 65,000+ page journal.20 The New Yorker: “Fredericks’s lecture [How to Read a Journal], in fact, proposes dropping the illusions of fiction altogether. He makes a case for immersing readers in a subjective record of an individual’s experience, in ‘real time,’ complete with all the errors, vagueness, lies, and mystifications that we engage in when we try to justify ourselves to ourselves. A journal is a ‘living thing,’ he says; a novel is a ‘taxidermist’s replica.”
(Would he have been pleased and proud, then, rather than insulted, that his most famous pupils took his teachings so to heart, and published diary-novels? But I digress.)
Since the last time I read The Secret History, I’d become more seriously a writer, and I read this time with an eye to how she did it. What was it I loved so much about this book? There was the pure satisfaction of its interlocking chess game of a plot, in which every strange twist feels absolutely logical. It was also something to do with the blending of high and low: the contrast of the rarefied world of the Greek students with the cocaine and Californianism. (If the novel has a central theme, it’s class.) The Secret History, I realised, was like Wolf Hall— or like Le Guin— in that the deep magic of it was to do with attention to the world of matter:21 the literary wizard’s-trick of lyrical descriptions of beauty that made the beautiful thing appear vividly in my imagination. I could see the shirt, the hair, the apple blossom, the snow. But my love of the world of this novel, my longing for it, was also— it suddenly came to me— about nostalgia.
It came out in 1992, when I was thirteen. Tartt was born in 1963, that is, 16 years before me. But the young-adult world she delineates in The Secret History is close enough to my own young-adult experience to be relatable. Cigarettes, phone calls, letters. It’s a world before digital technology, a world analogous to the one I still pine for. The plot hinges on those olden-day modes of communication; and indeed, another of the overarching themes is that of obsession with the past, of living anachronistically.
I remember a friendly argument with Amos over the Netflix TV show Sex Education: was it meant to be set in the present, or the past? The past, I said: look at the clothes, the school. The present, said Amos: they had phones. Eventually I realised it was a fantasy mash-up. None of it made any cohesive sense. The makers of the show wanted retro reference points, but they needed phones so that the plot-lines wouldn’t alienate their intended audience: digital natives, like Amos. It didn’t seem weird to him, it only seemed weird to me, the digital immigrant, the refugee from the Land Before Tech.
It is not now as it hath been of yore… The things which I have seen I now can see no more.22 It’s difficult to tease out from my own lived experience what is personal to me, what is cultural, what is generational, and what is universal. Or, for that matter, to tease out feelings about Big Tech from feelings about Climate Change and the Apocalypse in general. These things are knotted up. I want to talk, though, about what the recent past wasn’t. It’s not like I was a hunter-gatherer, at one with everything— but the world was holistic in a way it isn’t now: there weren’t all these time-holes everywhere. Smartphones feel that way to me, like malevolent portals to unimaginable wormholes.23 Nobody knows where those wormholes go at the present moment, let alone where they lead into the future. They take your face and throw it to a robot to eat and shit out. (At least a book is honest; it’s not data-mining you while you read it.)
I want to get back to those beautiful surfaces, the skins of the world of matter, but I know there’s no going back to pre-zombie times, when we mostly lived in the present moment and thought nothing of it.24 The gates of Eden are shut. What’s happened in my lifetime, in my lived memory, has never happened before in the entire history of humankind, and our little monke brains can’t handle it.25 This is as close as I can get to elucidating the Xennial experience.
The weirdest26 thing about all of this, though, is the hard fact that whenever it is that you happen to pop out onto this earth, the line of your life-years and the line of the calendar-years those unfold inside of are interwoven like two-ply thread, tensioned against each other. You can change place, but you can’t change time. There’s no stepping out of that twining of life and time except by death, when Atropos cuts the thread.
I was told in last night’s dream to add a quote from Winstanley.
I had, however, come across a Guardian article about The Last of the Innocents, which I liked for the poetry of the name, but the timeframe was slightly off: too early.
In the context of establishing that he was, indeed, born inside of that particular window of time
Andy pronounced the word ‘Zennials’, but as a portmanteau, surely ‘Ex-ennials’ would be more correct? The Oxford English Dictionary is also unsure: it gives both pronunciations. (Sign of a neologism generated in written language rather than spoken.)
Fun fact I stole off Wikipedia: in internet folklore, Xennials are those born between 1977 and 1983, the release years of the original three Star Wars films. (This was the bit that freaked me out the most: that the bracketing years I had settled on after much consideration— ‘77 to ‘83— were right there in black and white.)
However, some sociologists make the window 1975 - 1985. That seems too wide to me, but by that definition, two of the writers I cite in these footnotes also fall into the Xennial basket: Robert MacFarlane and Sheila Heti. Of course, anyone born in the early - mid 70s (Late Gen X) had a similarly formative experience— undergoing the same digital transition, but as young adults rather than teenagers. Anyway, I think of the Hinge as being something like Beltane, or any other seasonal festival: the flavour of it spills over at the edges.
Possibly
Along with— among other things— comfort eat and wabi-sabi.
In 2015 the Oxford Junior Dictionary provoked a massive backlash by removing a whole swathe of nature-related words, while introducing digital terminology in their place.
Guardian: Oxford Junior Dictionary’s replacement of ‘natural’ words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry
(Oxford University Press’ defence: “All our dictionaries are designed to reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages.”)
English nature writer Robert MacFarlane (born ‘76, just too early to be a Xennial) took the cut words and, in an effort to rewild young minds, turned them into a children’s book of what he called spells: The Lost Words: A Spell Book. The Lost Words was a bestseller, was hailed as an instant classic, won prizes, and spawned generations of spinoff projects.
Macfarlane had previously written an amazing book, Landmarks, all about endangered vernacular, words referring to natural phenomenal in the U.K. (I tested out the old Sussex words on Kev, and they were all legit.) Here Macfarlane discusses Landmarks in the context of the Oxford Junior Dictionary decision: Robert Macfarlane : The Word Hoard.
I found a silly quiz on the Guardian: Are You a Xennial? Take the Quiz
Question 10:
This was literally the first phone I ever owned, the Nokia 8110, known as The Matrix-phone due to its product placement in The Matrix. (I was / am a Luddite-lite late / non-adopter of tech. My sister, mocking me for being Amish: “Why do I need a car? I have this perfectly good horse.”)
Rule of thumb for testing Xennial status: ask people about their Nokia.
One of the ironies of all this is that my Dad was a hobby programmer and very early tech-adopter, so I grew up with computer games and Internet access from a younger age than most of my peers.
As opposed to Digital Natives, who swim in tech like fish in the sea, having known no other reality.
Thatcher became Prime Minister of the U.K. in 1979, Reagan President of the U.S.A. in early 1981.
Rogernomics: Neoliberalism in one fell swoop.
Like a kind of socioeconomic CPTSD
The explanation for generational characteristics is people undergoing social changes at the same age / stage of development: think of anyone you know who went through World War II. Or people who went through the Pandemic as children or young adults. Those are deeply formative experiences.
Also, although he’s using it as a diss, he’s not wrong about the astrology parallel. In astrology terms, this kind of generational trend is covered by Pluto’s placement. Pluto is such a slow-moving planet that each generation shares a Pluto placement in common: the Boomers, for instance, famously have Pluto in Leo. Pluto was in Libra from 1971 - 1984, a period that includes the birth-year of every writer I cite in these footnotes.
Here’s Chani Nicholas on the phenomenon: https://chaninicholas.com/pluto-and-the-power-of-generations/
I dislike owning stuff, and mostly I don’t want to read a book more than once, so I tend to read from the library. Exceptions to the non-book-ownership rule were reference books; rare or irreplaceable books; books I wanted to read repeatedly; books with sentimental value; books I wanted to read in future; books that I had read that were amazing and now here they were for a few bucks; books I wanted to give other people to read; or some combination of the aforementioned factors.
My three most recently-purchased books, all for a few bucks each:
Burntcoat, Sarah Hall
Motherhood, Sheila Heti
On Immunity, Eula Biss
All three of these books fall into the category of things I’ve read before and thought were great, but it was long enough ago that I want to read them again.
Biss’ book on art and economics, Having and Being Had, was pivotal for me, and I’ve read most of Sarah Hall. Burntcoat is her masterpiece, though.
(Biss is a Xennial, born ‘77: Hall and Heti are slightly too old— born ‘74 and ‘76 respectively.)
In my opinion, Wellington’s two best long-standing secondhand bookshops, though I have to put a plug in here for my friend Philip’s newly opened Undercurrent, on the corner of Vivian and Tory Streets; every time I go in there, I see books I covet.
Mary Renault: Fire From Heaven; The Persian Boy. (The first two novels of her Alexander the Great trilogy. Don’t bother with the last one, which takes place after Alexander’s death— it sucks.)
Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall. (Again, I think the first book of the trilogy is by far the strongest.)
Ursula K Le Guin: anything— she’s the ultimate. I recently re-read, from the library, two massive volumes: one was all her novellas in one volume, and the other was The Annals of the Western Shore— her late young adult trilogy, Gifts, Voices, and Powers. Both of these chunks of genius were next-level amazing.
Earthsea Quartet, of which, particularly The Tombs of Atuan.
The Left Hand of Darkness.
The Dispossessed, possibly my most-read novel of all time, and the book I would make everyone read if I were King of the World.
Any Rosemary Sutcliff (however, I don’t own any.)
Any Tove Jansson (likewise, I don’t seem to own any: probably I have lent them out and they never came back.)
Looking at this list, I notice that all the authors are female; and that the genres are historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and children’s books. (See— escapism into better worlds.)
Not a spoiler, as the murder is the opening scene: Wikipedia calls it an inverted detective story.
Mysteries, thrillers, and anything gratuitous or violent I generally avoid like the plague. No shade, I just genuinely can’t understand why these books are pleasurable to people.
I was correct: she has black hair, green eyes, is five feet tall, and dresses in masculine-cut suits. Ultra-stylish.
Unfortunately, this article suggests it’s not that good— bummer: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/the-most-ambitious-diary-in-history-claude-fredericks
(Diaries aren’t, usually. They’re like a stomach, digesting the same old meals over and over again.)
I have a theory that this is a female-writer thing, attention to all the mundane, non-heroic aspects of life. Ursula K Le Guin, from Voices: “I always wondered why the makers [storytellers] leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for— so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.”
William Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (Wordsworth is 207 years too old to be a Xennial)
My line in the sand: I’ve never owned a smartphone. I can’t hire an e-scooter, show a gig ticket on my phone, order an Uber, answer a question by resorting to the Internet, or see when the bus is coming. (I was forced to upgrade from my old Nokia with the demise of the 3G network.) A dumbphone used to be seen as merely an eccentric, old-fashioned affectation. As the years have passed, my phone has become a potent object that people find shocking, perverse, nostalgic, charming, etc. etc.
There’s a particularly horrible Black Mirror episode that cut close to the bone: the one where people have a little chip behind their ear and are recording everything through their eyes 24/7. (Season 1 Episode 3 - The Entire History of You.) There’s a character who’s been ‘gouged’— had her chip stolen, and then not replaced it. The frisson of that scene is relatable.
More Neo-Luddite rants anon, no doubt.
Though I frequently fantasise about a massive solar flare that fries all tech
Like Bo Burnham says in his Kanye rant, You think you can, I know you can’t. (Seven years too young to be a Xennial, Bo’s a Millennial, but I think there’s a Xennial flavour to his nihilistic humour. Ye, however, is a Xennial.)
Wyrdest
So interesting. Resonates a lot with what I've noticed about other friends who were born in the same timeframe. I was a toddler and a little kid in the very last remnants of that era -- if that --- perhaps only because my parents were a bit later to the game of acquiring tech gadgets than others. I have a sense of the pre-digital time - but its all a bleary dream. Mostly its filled with fond memories of all these odd devices that briefly sprung-up before smartphones and social media swallowed everything. Taping things on the radio. Rewinding VHS. Floppy disks, CD-Roms. Home-video camcorders. Getting a bloody neo-pet. Dial-up internet. Portable cd-players. First USB sticks. Flip-top phones. Blackberries. various iterations of the iPod. msn. phone snake.
There is a lot more here than I can immediately process and react to. Too many resonances; I'm experiencing a temporary overload. So far, just one word: blimey.