It’s unbecoming to gripe about millennial fiction, cool-girl fiction, sad-girl fiction and so on, but some books – such as Everyone I Know Is Dying, the debut novel by Emily Slapper – lean so heavily into the tropes of this literary non-genre that it begins to seem like the publishing industry is playing a strange joke on you.
Our first-person narrator is a young woman with an old woman’s name (of course). Iris moves to London seeking success in all its forms – financial, aesthetic, social, romantic. She subscribes to the ideals of the modern age (getting up at 6.44am to do her beauty routine, always aspiring to “the next rung” on the career ladder) but upon achieving her goals becomes so disillusioned that she falls into a deep depression. The book attempts to dramatise this depression, à la Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss. And let’s just say Moshfegh and Mason have a lot to answer for.
Reading Everyone I Know Is Dying is like playing millennial-fiction bingo. Ostensibly edgy sexual references? Check. Power plays in relationships? Check. Overanalytical prose? Check. Beautiful and skinny protagonist who hates herself and doesn’t eat? Bingo! With passages like the following, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re reading a Sally Rooney parody:
“I put some apple in my mouth, but the sweetness hurts my tongue, so I spit it out and put the rest in the bin. I feel pride at the restraint. The only thing better than knowing other people are eating unhealthy food is not eating anything myself.”
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A generous reader will feel what Slapper is trying to do here – to be as unflinching as Annie Ernaux, as dark and moody as Sylvia Plath; to expose in a frank and vulnerable way the grinding, paranoid toil of mental illness. The famed “unlikeable protagonist” is central to this project, and Iris is one for the ages.
But the problem with this book lies not in likeability but plausibility. Things happen out of the blue – there’s no cause and effect. Woman sleeps with her boss. No consequences. Grandmother bequeaths estate to granddaughter in her will, bypassing all natural heirs. No hassle. Characters fail to show love or have any chemistry with one another. “I love you,” they say.
One feels, as one reads Everyone I Know Is Dying, the shadow of a good novel, somewhere off in the wings. But what we hold in our hands is a poor imitation. Millennial fiction’s unhallowed ghost.
