The cutoff for being born into Generation X was about 1980, the cutoff for Generation Y (a.k.a. the Millennials) was about 1996, and the cutoff for Generation Z was about 2010. What should the next batch of babies be called—what comes after Z?
Alpha, apparently. That’s the (Greek) letter that the unofficial namers of generations—marketers, researchers, cultural commentators, and the like—have affixed to Gen Z’s successors, the oldest of whom are on the cusp of turning 10. The Generation Alpha label, if it lasts, follows the roughly 15-year cycle of generational delineations. Those delineations keep coming, even as, because of a variety of demographic factors, they seem to be getting less and less meaningful as a way of segmenting the population; in recent decades, there hasn’t been a clear-cut demographic development, like the postwar baby boom, to define a generation around, so the dividing lines are pretty arbitrary. How much do members of this new generation, or any generation, really have in common?
I don’t remember ever being afraid of the dark. If my mother were still alive perhaps she’d remind me of times when I begged to leave the light on at bedtime or came scurrying into my parents’ room, terrified of monsters that lurked in the pitch-black corners of my own.
But what I remember is standing on the back seat of a Galaxy 500, looking out the rear window as my mother drives along unlit country roads. I stare, with a deep thrill I can’t name, at the black sky above and then at the rushing road below, so briefly illuminated by the car’s taillights before it disappears into endless shadow.
One of the books’s greatest strengths lies in its descriptions of caring for an elderly person: the patient’s misdirected rage, their loss of dignity. Kemp relays these descriptions bluntly, which makes them all the more moving.
Actress is the story of (fictitious) Irish theatre legend Katherine O’Dell. As with Enright’s previous novels, this one – her seventh – takes the form of a long backward glance, a biographical tour through the years. Unlike her past work, this offering features a decidedly stripped-back family – for the most part just a mother-and-daughter pairing. Fortunately, smaller scale doesn’t mean fewer rewards. This is another skilfully crafted, emotionally charged novel from an expert practitioner.
It is hard now to recapture the shock of 1962 when the iterations of Campbell’s soup went on display at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (New York wasn’t interested). But the cumulative effect of their pristine forms, their tromp l’oeil construction, their obsessive reiteration (there were 32 prints, one for each flavour), luminous banality and, above all, their thereness, was to blast apart everything that we thought – and think – we know about art.