The “Millennial Novel” Comes Of Age
On Alexandra Tanner’s WORRY
It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? About two years, give or take, since the last time I wrote a Substack. We’re dusting it off today so that I can tell you about my favorite book of 2024—Alexandra Tanner’s WORRY. It’s a phenomenal debut novel, which I frustratingly didn’t pick up until after the very short window when most publications will consider a review. Here, then, are some thoughts:
I love it whenever there’s a specific moment where something really clicks. Like solving a puzzle or trying to figure out a magic trick, it’s thrilling, and satisfying, when you can suddenly see how the whole thing is going to work. In 2024, there was no better instance of these moments than the one I experienced about 35 pages (give or take) into Worry, the debut novel by Alexandra Tanner.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—the year is 2019 and Jules, our protagonist, is a 28 year old living in Brooklyn. She is, by all metrics, coasting. It’s a life that she doesn’t enjoy, but one that she could conceivably live forever. She works a job that she doesn’t particularly like and that does not pay her enough. She’s in a situationship (though the term hadn’t really been invented yet). She lives above her means and is simply hoping that it will all work out.
Then one day, her younger sister, Poppy, washes up on her doorstep. Jules does the familial thing, and inducts Poppy into her life. Poppy’s sudden arrival makes Jules take stock of her own life, seeing it anew from an onlooker’s perspective. It shakes her from a stoned stupor. It makes her go insane.
Jules is browsing apartment listings one morning, searching for something nearer to the apartment of the guy she has been seeing. She’s flirting, as the stagnant tend to do, with the idea of radical action. She’s considering upending everything for someone whom she’s not even sure she really likes, mostly to feel like she has any agency at all. Then it begins.
Unspooling across multiple pages in a single, acrobatic sentence, Jules spirals out. She and this guy have been sleeping together for nine weeks. But not really nine weeks, because Jules got an infection that required all sorts of creams and ointments, which she was allergic to, and required a different set of creams and ointments to remedy, which then also didn’t work. So she Googles her symptoms and reads about how long diseases can lie dormant in your body, and so she goes to the doctor to get screened, and she’s perfectly healthy but the doctor tells her not to do anything at all about the rash, and just wait it out, so really Jules and the guy have only been sleeping together for five weeks, and “for some reason [having sex] feels like an apology I am making to him.”
This sort of blood-racing, acid reflux spiral is a perfect microcosm of the book. It’s also one of the essential building blocks that Tanner works with (she pulls off a similar thing in her Granta short story, “Bitter North”). These are sudden waves of deeply felt, animal panic that none of our thoroughly modern solutions—Calm™️ or Headspace™️ meditations, or white / brown / pink / green noise generators, or CBD infused chocolates—can soothe. The effect is so, so good.
Worry is a miraculous novel. It’s not the shooting star, “arrival of a new voice” that blurb-givers and reviewers are so fond of. It feels more akin to the completion of something. The overview, about a twenty-something living in Brooklyn, might suggest something familiar, comfortable, and maybe even relatable. But make no mistake here, Worry glows fiery and dangerous, like the coils on a stove. It is the first truly great millennial novel, the fully-realized product of a style that has been stumbling toward itself for years.
The so-called “millennial novel” seems to operate by two modes: ennui and anxiety. Picking up where the gen-x slackers left off, the millennial novelist (as an avatar for the generation at large) is overeducated, underemployed, and adrift in a status quo that they thought they had changed. Disoriented and bleary-eyed in the horrible comedown of Obama-era optimism, the millennial novel has lots of ideas, but they lack the tools to realize any of them. This is where the anxiety arrives—in the feeling that one should be “doing more.” The way that we spend our days is the way that we spend our lives, as the saying goes, and our finite time on earth is passing. What do we have to show for it? Best not to ask.
The characters in the inescapable novels of Sally Rooney, for example, paraphrase writers and philosophers, and then smoke horrible dirt weed in their cars after shifts at whatever job they can hold down at the time. Millennial literature tends to tell the story of a generation haunted by a quality of life that they could see, but could not reach. In fact, dissociation, alienation, et al, tend to be prominent flavors of the millennial novel, regardless of nationality. Tanner is American, Rooney is Irish, but the through-line can also be drawn across the stifling summer of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, the simmering work of Elisa Shua Dusapin, the tundra of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s The End of the World, My Love and of course the Trazodone-drones of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
As the 21st century reached its turbulent cruising altitude, the “monoculture” began to splinter. The rise of social media allowed for curated niches of interest to hold space that they never had before, but it also allowed for a different sort of global dissatisfaction to take its place, driven largely by the new developments of late-capitalism.
Which is to say that Worry is decidedly an “Internet novel.” Many of its scenes involve the Internet directly—scrolling feeds, replying to emails, scrolling feeds, applying for jobs, and of course, scrolling feeds. But even in the scenes that do not directly involve the Internet, it still buzzes away in the background like an air conditioning unit, or a wasp’s nest.
Think about it: when you look down at your phone, the real world persists in your peripheral vision. When you are in the world, your phone, and all that it is connected to, continues to exist in your pocket, or tote bag. When the delineation between offline and online was allowed to blur, sometime in the early 2010s, it meant an abundance of information, convenience, and connectivity, but it also meant that there was no longer a boundary. By 2019, year of the book’s setting, the internet was everywhere. Online was aware of offline, offline aware of online. There was no escape from the other to be found.
In Worry, Jules’ relationship with the internet parallels her sense of self. She uses the internet to hide, to unwind, but the placid surface of the Instagram feed conceals the terror beneath. Similarly, Jules seems easy-going and effortless to everyone in her life, but as we saw in the two-page-long sentence mentioned above, beneath that calm surface she is writhing.
It’s obviously implied in the title, but a profound darkness lurks around the edges of Worry. We hear about a young girl who goes for an elective cosmetic surgery, and dies on the table after an allergic reaction to the anesthesia. Men on dating apps hurl vile combinations of anti-Semitic and misogynistic slurs at Jules before she has even said a word. Every time the sisters remember someone from their childhood, and look them up online, they are met with news stories, or obituaries, or both. Pets seem uniquely doomed, and several of them meet genuinely gruesome fates over the course of the novel.
Worry is light on plot, in the same way that real life is light on plot. Most of the above examples appear as vignettes, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them setpieces that pile up like dishes in the sink. The exception is the Mormon Mommies, an online community whose arc plays out across the course of the book. In her travels across the internet, Jules indulges in the content of Mommy Bloggers as a sort of spectator-sport. In keeping with the stagnation of the millennial condition, Jules tells herself that all of this endless consumption is for something. All of this scrolling is research for some brilliant paper that she’ll never actually write.
The Mommies make Jules feel sane, and grounded, because as so-often happens in real life, the emphasis on traditional lifestyles reveals itself to be a grift. The Mommies sell snake-oil nutritional supplements, mostly to each other, and egg each other on into a downward spiral of conspiracy theories and (again) anti-Semitic rhetoric.
And this is also where much of the true brilliance of Tanner’s novel lies. There is commentary here, but it hides just beneath the surface, in the suggestions and the parallels. She never chances a direct appeal to the reader, to say something about “The Way We Live Now.” Instead, she lets us experience it as the characters do, and allows us to bring in experiences we’ve all had. The restaurants all suck and are too expensive. The art sucks. Jules and Poppy walk out of movies, they work dull jobs, they go on horrid dates.
But Worry is not a lecture about contemporary life. Instead, we encounter Tanner as a friend, the way you might catch someone’s eye across a miserable party. Conveying silently to each other, wow this is fucking bananas huh?, safe in the knowledge that there is at least one other sane person here.
Tanner’s references points are hyper-specific, geographically (the “weird triangle” at Atlantic and Washington); culturally (Pride and Prejudice [2005]); and emotionally (worry, duh) but it’s the way that she smartly approaches the points of hyper-contemporary reference that set Tanner and her novel apart from their peers.
Like in the case of the Mormon Mommies, Tanner refuses the easy route, i.e. quoting from real-life conspiracy theorists themselves. Instead she invents phrases, slogans, and hashtags that sound familiar, but are largely of her own invention. By creating a fictitious, parallel version of something that actually exists, Tanner is able to glance off her subjects at an angle. It’s an effortless way to convey the flavor, the general vibe of a place and time, without running the risk of becoming dated or slipping into the dreaded territory of cringe.
When real world flavors of the month, or discourses du jour, do appear in the book, Tanner chooses them with care. Allowing the brief intervening years between the novel’s setting, in 2019, and the novel’s release, in 2024, to reveal which events and “main characters” would crystallize in public consciousness. The result is brilliant. You encounter besieged influencer Caroline Calloway the way that you might expect to meet one of America’s founding fathers in a historical novel—a cameo by a famous figure in a period piece.
And like any good historical setting, there are lots of smaller, more specific points of late-2010s ephemera, for the real freaks. Anish Kapoor’s “Vantablack” is used as an adjective. An acquaintance posts an Instagram story about the 90s anime classic Neon Genesis Evangelion, which landed on Netflix to much fanfare in 2019. There’s a reveal that Jules had sent a “lukewarm cover letter” for a job at Bon Appetite, which was, at the time, on an ascendant streak.
Tanner is masterfully playing to multiple registers at once. Worry works on whatever level you are able to meet it. One doesn’t need to be able to recognize each and every doomed startup, or the nods to real-life factions of online weirdos (“Barefoot is Legal”), to feel the immense sense of foreboding in the book’s 2019 setting. As readers, we know that the world would change drastically the following year, just as we know that the Titanic will eventually hit the iceberg.
This seems to be the way that Worry was deliberately constructed. It is a time capsule. It is a curated snapshot of its moment, to be opened somewhere down the line. It allows future populations a direct window into the past—or, to use a 2020 expression, a direct window into “the before times.”
From the start, Jules ponders the unreality of her moment, looking at her phone and feeling outside of space and time, as if she were her own ancestor. So too does Tanner, thinking four-dimensionally about how a future reader might remember the year of the book’s setting.
And there’s very little romance about it, future reader, because the Brooklyn of 2019 was so intoxicatingly stupid, and Tanner captures it with an anthropologist’s eye. The cast of characters beyond the two sisters is largely interchangeable—everyone went to a good school, and works in “media,” and gets cagey when you ask how they afford their apartments. Everyone is posturing all the time, and one of the worst possible ends to this highwire act is to be accused of being “performative.” As such, Jules wrestles constantly with her cognitive dissonances. She’s susceptible to influencers, who seem to sit on either shoulder like the cartoon angel & devil, as she toys with the idea of purchasing a SodaStream even though they’re an Israeli company on the BDS boycott list. She knows all the statistics about police brutality, but keeps a police-blotter app installed on her phone (push notifications on).
So perfectly is the bug preserved in its stupid amber that there were multiple moments where I swore I was reading conversations that I had actually participated in (on the ontological ethics of owning a dog in a small apartment, for example). It inspired some genuinely startling moments of self-reflection, and it likely will for you, too. But ultimately, that’s just how a certain type of person (overeducated, underemployed, and image-conscious) talked in 2019.
Worry is an extremely talkative book, and Tanner has a peerless ear for the way America sounds right now. It’s not a shock that the television adaptation of Worry was announced just four days after the book was published. The script is basically there, and nobody else is writing dialogue this good. The conversations are quick and emotive, displaying a real talent for both subtle emotion and explosive comedic timing. Tanner avoids slang (nobody here is “having a normal one”) because it tends to age extremely rapidly, and instead, she nails the nuances and tics of patterned speech, which exist on much longer timelines. She perfectly deploys “like” as a sort-of punctuation, which a character might use in order to like, soften a statement that would otherwise come off as pretentious. Conversations often lilt, shifting away from deadpan in order to roll uphill toward a question mark, despite the fact that the sentence is a statement. Characters ask “does that make sense?” about things that could not possibly be more clear. If “vocal fry” could be written, I am sure she would have done it.
All of this is to say that the dialogue is natural, authentic, and timeless despite its concrete setting. It is also very, very funny. And it’s all carried along by Tanner’s understanding of Poppy and Jules, which clearly runs soul-deep. The two characters develop slowly, and realistically. They change each other through conversation, jokes, occasional flashes of teeth. It’s this gradual buildup of smaller moments of understanding that really sells them. There’s no epiphany at the conclusion of a sermon, because nobody with a sibling is ever going to believe their sibling’s psychoanalysis outright. Later on, you concede. In one scene, Poppy apologizes to Jules via text message from elsewhere in the apartment, long after their argument on the walk home.
Like in the cross-section mentioned at the beginning of this review, where the act of sex “feels like an apology,” Tanner will often end a scene on a somber note. Other examples include: “it’s not that art is dead. It’s just that I’m not going to be one of the ones who makes it” and “I don’t say anything, pretending to really like what we’re watching.”
These are brief moments of vulnerability, as if a novel were capable of oversharing (or worse, trauma-dumping) before then realizing what it has done, and abruptly correcting course. One scene ends with the NYPD Harbor Patrol pulling a body from the water beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the other side of a line break, Jules is riffing on dating apps. It’s like a playful “anywayyyy” text to signal that “I am feeling exposed and I am putting my walls back up. We will not be discussing this any further.” These sorts of situations, in my experience, do tend to be followed by the sharing of jokes, memes, screenshots of tweets. Structurally, the book’s version of this is to dive right back to the jokes, or a shared mutual distaste for something—multiple sections begin with “someone I went to high school with…”
Chances are, that if you know anything about Worry, it is about how incredibly funny the book is—and it really cannot be overstated just how funny it actually is. But beyond a sharp sense of humor, the lurking darkness of the wider world, and the exceptional depth to which Tanner realizes her protagonists, the thing that separates Worry from so much other “millennial literature” is that it is extremely, unabashedly gross.
From the very first sentence, the book oozes and swells. Poppy has hives that sometimes reach the size of dinner plates. They crack and bleed. Jules has a vaginal polyp that requires minor surgery. The texture of clotted menstrual blood is “gritty.” There are post-coital towels covered in fluids. Everyone’s apartments are too small, and you can hear them using the bathroom. Anxiety causes people to vomit, or sometimes just to retch for extended periods of time. The internet coughs up horrors: videos of jumpers from the twin towers, zoo animals drowning, violence against women packaged as “true crime” and consumed for entertainment.
It all lends the book a genuine physicality. A bodily understanding of the characters, and their situations, that is often missing among the general millennial malaise. The millennial novel has often felt a little anemic, very much in its own head about purpose, potential, self-actualization. But it’s the body-horror twist on the comedy of manners that truly gives Worry its edge. Flesh and blood appears to have been the missing piece all along. For all the paralytic anxiety rippling through millennials as a global population, this is the first book to capture the jagged peaks and shadowy valleys of how these generational preoccupations actually feel. The terror is palpable, instinctual, and truly substantive.
Worry is a triumph. A novel of hot-wristed adrenaline, like the rush you get from tipping back just a bit too far in your office desk chair at the job you don’t even like.
Alexandra Tanner is a writer not just on the pulse, but of it. She is there in the blood itself.