(“He wanted a lot of things,” Torday writes of his troubled protagonist, “mostly things he’d never have no matter how hard he tried.”) Before long, other disgruntled millennials start making their own copycat “Boomer Missives,” ranting about the impossibility of homeownership and how much they have to pay into a Social Security program that probably won’t exist when they’re old enough to need it.Īlthough Torday-who studied under George Saunders in Syracuse’s writing program and shares his mentor’s knack for sneakily empathetic characters-has created a lightly fictionalized world in which, for example, it is very easy for anyone to buy a rubber David Crosby mask, the anti-boomer sentiment he captures in Boomer1 is also a visible phenomenon on the real, live internet. They tap into something that many dissatisfied people his age are feeling but cannot quite articulate, that the expiration date on even the most modest version of the American dream has come and gone. That was the promise that was promised them-but more important, that was the promise that was promised us. “They grew up amid a world in which they made a promise, signed an unwritten social contract: you worked until you were sixty-five and then you stepped aside. “They were meant to retire at the age of sixty-five, these parents of ours,” Mark rants into his computer.

And so he directs his ire at none other than the largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, anyone born in that postwar, pre-Pill population surge between 19. In Daniel Torday’s new novel, Boomer1, a 31-year-old man sits in front of a Grateful Dead poster in his parents’ basement, where he lives, puts on a rubber David Crosby mask, and stares into his webcam to begin recording another so-called “Boomer Missive.” His name is Mark Brumfeld, and he is a relatively unremarkable specimen of his generation-drowning in student loan and credit card debt, unable to find steady employment, and searching for an easy scapegoat for the all-encompassing disillusionment he feels about his life.

Boomer1 by Daniel Torday