Too Young for Too Long: On Daniel Torday’s ‘Boomer1’
1.
The term solecism—an error in syntax; a minor infelicity; a violation of social protocol—was one of Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Word of the Day selections in spring 2004, around the same time that Cassie Black (née Claire Stankowitcz) began considering a move to Brooklyn in earnest. The United States had been at war in Afghanistan for three years and in Iraq for one; a bedroom in Greenpoint was $600 a month; and the oldest millennials were galloping into adulthood. Cassie, about to graduate from Wellesley, heard people were moving to Brooklyn and decided she would, too. Not one for solecism of any kind, following is what Cassie always did. Mark Brumfeld, however, a Colgate alumnus and soft-boy mandolin player, would try to change that in the course of Daniel Torday’s Boomer1.
“Solecism” appears again and again in this book, where its widest possible meaning—doing things out of order—captures the conflict at this novel’s heart. Partly the (un)love story of Cassie and Mark, partly a chronicle of New York from post-9/11 to post-recession, Boomer1 is entirely a story about the generation that came of age in between, whose members will likely not live better than their parents. Or, to be unambiguous: This is a “millennial novel,” and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it. For the millennial novel. For millennials being history, which we are now, officially.
In March, Pew Research Center that anyone “born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22 to 37 in 2018) will be considered a Millennial” henceforth “to keep the Millennial generation analytically,” emphasis added. While this new clarity heralded the welcome end of categorizing everyone under 40 as a millennial, it also insinuated that millennials were now an archive that was ready to be examined. As if our individual histories—our data, our old online selves, our texts, our itinerant nudes—haven’t been at our fingertips, if not in the palms of our hands, for quite some time.
