I thought I knew a great deal about language already. I had by then wandered in and out of five languages and was adept at comparing and contrasting them. But more than that, I felt I was made of language—that my soul was the product of all the language fragments that had blown my way and accumulated into a semblance of a whole, all of them held together by my ardor for their alchemies of sound and meaning. Nothing else in the world drew the same bodily response from me (I was just beginning to have an inkling that sex might have similar possibilities). I could imagine no version of my self that was not about language. I thought I knew language intimately, in a way that made me possessive of it.
What happened in that linguistics classroom was a shock to me. After the first session or two, I was certain that my life had changed, though I couldn’t have said exactly how. I did know that I was about to abandon my plans of becoming a novelist.
The physical form of a book is more than just its packaging; it’s integral to the story it conveys. In a world increasingly dominated by digital media, this aspect of storytelling deserves celebration. Books transcend mere narratives—they offer comfort and refuge.
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.
Melanie Cheng’s characters tend to be untethered and out of place. In her short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian premier’s literary award for fiction, the author introduced various people navigating disconnection. And in her debut novel, Room for a Stranger (2019), two adrift, solitary souls form an unexpected friendship. This interest in separation, in the ways we isolate from and reconnect to one another, persists in Cheng’s new novel, The Burrow.
Clean is an intense novel about class and power and the kind of deep down rot that lingers, despite the most vigorous scrubbing.