I once read a pop culture essay which identified thriller writer John Grisham as “this generation’s Charles Dickens.” Part of me smiled at the cool insight the reference provided to an author I enjoyed escaping with; the other part of me rolled my eyes in snobby contempt for such an outrageous, aloof, and absurd statement. Can any writer truly be compared to Dickens, and if so, wouldn’t a writer like Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison more likely be the Dickens of Grisham’s generation? Or perhaps a better question is: can we be done with tagging any contemporary writer as “this generation’s” Dickens or Twain or Austen or any other distinct voice from the past? I’ve felt this way often, most recently with the rise of Irish writer and Trinity grad Sally Rooney, who by age twenty-seven was garnering raves for her first two novels, Normal People and Conversations with Friends, and who was referred to by her editor at Faber & Faber as the “Snapchat generation’s Salinger.” Perhaps it’s time to end the “voice of a generation” moniker and let Salinger and the others rest in peace while allowing all authors to just be themselves.

In her most recent work, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Rooney has taken aim at her literary celebrity, portraying a young novelist’s discomfort with her fame and the expectations that come from speaking so aptly to and for a large demographic, in her case the Millennials, which may or may not be “the Snapchat generation.” In creating the character of Alice, a famous author who has just released her third novel and laments both her success and her valuing of that success, Rooney takes a meta-fictional and clearly sardonic approach to being the latest Salinger. As Alice secludes herself in a seaside cottage for much of the novel, though occasionally jetting off to Paris for a book tour, it’s easy to understand the tug-of-war that has been the life of celebrity novelists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Would Rooney’s fans actually be impressed with the comparison to Salinger? Would they even consider being the next Salinger a compliment? With what we know now of Salinger’s not-so-private life, the answer is probably not. And that’s all more reason to end the tradition.

From at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the title “voice of a generation” has been assigned endlessly to best-selling or culturally significant writers of a given era. Prior to Fitzgerald spotlighting the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation, however, it’s more difficult to apply such a label to other eras and authors. Certainly, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain wrote profoundly of their time and place, and each could certainly be a voice of their generation. And, of course, Shakespeare would have to be the voice of the Elizabethan Age, though it’d be tough to assign him to a single demographic. But since the time of Salinger the title has become an all-too-common if not excessive moniker tagged to the zeitgeist. Granted, at precisely the same time Salinger was publishing short stories and his iconic novel, Jack Kerouac was emerging as the voice of the Beat Generation, which morphed into the Hippie generation, and his became the voice of any group pushing against conformity. Yet, with the angsty but unforgettable Holden Caulfield expressing the frustration of youth so aptly that it still rings true in the twenty-first century, it was the Salinger-esque tone that became the quintessential voice of a generation in terms of emerging youth culture, as readers and the media appear to be forever on the lookout for the “next Salinger.” 

Granted, for the purpose of this discussion it’s often the coming-of-age novels which align an author with a generation, and noting Rooney as the Salinger of her generation marks the significance of perhaps the last widely known and easily marketable author as having the “voice of a generation.” Such a voice has to be about the characters, what they’re saying and what they’re thinking. 

An author prior to Rooney widely tagged as the voice of a generation was Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland. In 1991 it was blatantly scripted on the back cover of Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture where the moniker was applied, with one critic calling the quirky paperback novel “a modern day Catcher in the Rye.” Coupland subsequently and uncomfortably faced the burden of being the “voice of a generation.” Within a few years, he responded by declaring the “Death of Generation X” in a column for Details magazine. And to be honest, most members of Generation X never actually read Generation X, if they’d even heard of it. The same might be said of Rooney, though her book sales and the film adaptation of Normal People indicate resonance with and relevance to a wide audience. Ultimately, the voice of a generation reflects how it feels to be alive at a certain time for people of a certain age, and it’s fair to acknowledge the authenticity of Rooney’s stories to Millennials and Gen Z.

Voice of a generation is a particularly tough distinction in an increasingly global and diverse society, especially when a definitive group isn’t actually designated. Who exactly makes up the “Snapchat Generation”? Because it seems like teenagers of Gen Z are the primary users of the platform, it’s hard to believe the writing of twenty-seven year old Millennial Rooney is resonating with tweens and high school kids. Who really speaks for and to the under-forty set these days? And could the same voice resonate with both thirteen and thirty-year-olds? In terms of subject matter, attitude, and popularity, Billie Eilish is a much more apt voice of young people. Don’t musical artists like Khalid and Drake or Arianna Grande and Olivia Rodrigo speak to and for them far more than an author? In terms of novelists, especially those geared toward and writing to younger audiences, it seems reasonable to argue John Green or J.K. Rowling is a better, or certainly more significant, widely known, and relevant voice for Generation Z, not to mention the Millennials. In fact, is there a more influential writer of the past thirty years than J.K. Rowling? While perhaps not the “voice of a generation” of young readers, she was certainly the voice it listened to most, at least until an ongoing Twitter battle over the issue of gender created a pariah out of the best-selling and most impactful author of recent history.

It’s tough to identify the voice of a generation when some people are even scrutinizing the idea that generations of people actually share a common identity. In that regard, the question of whether the “voice” speaks to, for, or about a generation is worth considering, for that perspective is a key difference in the roles played by Rowling and Eilish for Millennials and Gen X. In an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan world, there’s not one voice but many, all speaking for varied groups and subcultures of the contemporary age. Yet many people are still inclined to believe loosely in the idea of common associations linking people of a specific age and even calling them a generation. Often a generation has less to do with a person’s age and more about the allusions and references they understand. Douglas Coupland asserts that Generation X was never meant to describe a demographic of people born during specific years. Having said he drew the title from sociologist Paul Fussel’s book Class, Coupland explains how the term “category X” actually refers to people who exist outside the established social classes. Coupland adapted the term to refer to twentysomethings in the early 1990s who had turned their backs on the traditional career tracks of their parents and instead entered adulthood living a job-transient existence in the service industry, choosing lifestyle over career. 

For her part, shortly after being applied with the moniker—or albatross, as the case may be—Sally Rooney told The Guardian she knows she’s not her generation’s Salinger, and that we should all know and acknowledge that, too. There are no more “voices of a generation, “if there ever even truly was one. There are no more J.D. Salingers. In a contemporary world that, to quote Coupland from Generation X, “has grown beyond our ability to tell stories about it,” there’s no room nor reason for a single voice, a Salinger for this generation, or any generation for that matter. In today’s society, even J.D. Salinger himself wouldn’t be the next Salinger.