Millennial Bumbling in “The Book of George”

George is unlikeable. The protagonist of Kate Greathead’s second novel, The Book of George, is defined by his faults. He loses his temper easily, he constantly makes bad decisions—like truly, awful choices, alienates the people around him, and is simply unpleasant to spend time with. Yet despite George’s frustrating and grating nature, Greathead has managed to trick us into caring about him, delivering a novel that comfortably holds the reader in an enticing embrace. 

The novel follows the title character from his pre-teen years, a childhood marred by his parents’ divorce, through his adolescence, defined and perhaps elongated by his tumultuous relationship with Jenny, and finally bringing us to a present where middle-aged George has reached the pinnacle of his unpleasant life. What makes this novel successful is that there’s absolutely nothing particularly remarkable about George. He’s a millennial everyman, a symbol of a generation’s angst and inability to grow up. 

Greathead has quietly delivered a scathing indictment of millennials in a novel that risks becoming one of those that defines a generation. Almost a decade ago, Tony Tulathimutte tried to explain why there’s no ‘Millennial’ novel, arguing that the myth of a generational novel “wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality.” Tulathimutte follows up by describing the genre as “contemporary social novel, set in one or more major cities, with a large cast of unhappy, mostly young, middle- or upper-class characters who emotionally develop in some not-too-traumatic way,” and it’s hard not to see that definition in The Book of George. If Greathead has defined millennials, the picture does not flatter us. 

A refrain throughout the novel is how George; his sister Cressida; Jenny, his on-and-frequently-off-again girlfriend; and his gang of college friends constantly reflect on whether they are growing up and becoming adults. For a generation often typecast as suffering from Peter Pan syndrome, these characters seem acutely aware of their immaturity. We see this lack of maturity most of all in George. He impulsively breaks his hand smashing it into a wall, he drifts aimlessly from career to career, and, even in his chosen vocation of writing, never seems to follow through long enough to complete a manuscript. 

George’s abstract aspiration to become a writer haunts him throughout the novel. Too many people have praised his writing along the way for him to ever consider giving up. And for him, writing is the easy way out of a lot of unpleasantness like working. On more than one occasion he has other people supporting him to pursue his art even though it’s largely left unfinished. At one point, his mother is cleaning out his childhood bedroom and tosses away some childish writings. George is heartbroken, as though some lost story from elementary school might have been his big break. 

But that’s the thing. George has plenty of big breaks. His uncle sets him up in a career, which he eventually walks away from. He stars in a commercial providing a six-figure payout. Even in love he’s successful in somehow convincing Jenny more than once to love him, and even support him. What George excels at is in making bad decisions. It can be frustrating as a reader to watch as he implodes his life over and over, especially as he apologizes time and time again. 

Partly George’s generally unlikeable persona is offset by the way Greathead casually tells his story. There are moments that we can’t help but find amusing, like for instance when George converts his ad earnings into crypto. You can probably guess how that turns out for him. Similarly, George’s name ends up appearing on the Shitty Media Men list, although this is truly no fault of his own—he shares his name with an uncle who deserves to be there. George experiences a kind of Forrest Gump–like relationship to events essential to the millennial experience, although through a darker, more ironic lens. 

Greathead does not restrict her indictments to George. Jenny, who at first comes across as a grounded, working-class woman poised to straighten up the privileged, coddled George, turns out to be the exact opposite. After enrolling in law school, she’s particularly affectionate for the Occupy Wall Street Movement, while also maintaining a habit for expensive vintage clothing. She has closets full of clothing, and even longs for an expensive, impractical Victorian cape. Jenny defends her purchases as reusing rather than consuming, as if she’s saving the planet by buying more clothing, even while marching in solidarity with the most significant class movement in a generation. In either case, spending money is fine because of course she has a trust fund. There’s no working-class savior coming to redeem their bourgeois souls. 

Much of the tension in the novel is created through George and Jenny’s relationship. Chapter to chapter, they break up and get back together. There’s a surprising amount of sympathy created in this failed intimacy. We want George to figure out his life, to grow up, and once and for all to give Jenny what she wants. What she wants is an emotional connection and for him to be in love with her. She wants marriage and a family. We yearn for George to figure it out before she inevitably ends things once again. 

Despite George’s irritating choices and outright dumb decisions, Greathead has written a novel that’s easy to feel invested in. She builds this comfort by writing the chapters as episodic vignettes, each a largely self-contained narrative, but building them into something greater. There are moments where reading through them feels perhaps like they were written in isolation. In a few instances, the narrative voice interjects an exposition where none should be needed in a novel, a reference to an event in another chapter that feels slightly out of place in the moment. But this is a minor quibble rather than some kind of damning flaw.

There are likely a dozen novels in half as many years that, like Greathead’s, achieve a kind of synopsis of millennial life. Perhaps, as Tulathimutte suggested, there’s no singular generational novel. An interdisciplinary, multicultural generation of disparate individuals will never have one. But even in an era of individuality, Greathead has captured a sense of commonality we can all recognize in George. The Book of George is not the novel of a generation, but it is, at the very least, one of the many.

FICTION
The Book of George
By Kate Greathead
Henry Holt & Company
Published October 8, 2024