The Book of George, by Kate Greathead

A tale of millennial ennui.

The Book of George is a portrait of an uninspired man of millennial heritage shuffling his way through about twenty eight years of an uncertain coming of age drama. George, the protagonist in this novel, or more appropriately for millennial fiction, the slacker, moves in and out of a series of blundering romantic episodes with Jenny, his long suffering girlfriend, while he also searches haphazardly for a professional identity. As for his relationship with Jenny, George basically says all the wrong things. And as for his profession, he searches in all the wrong places. For anyone other than a millennial, George would be a tragic hero. But George doesn’t try hard enough to be tragic. He haplessly treads water as he watches the collapse of the twin towers, a great recession, and the COVID pandemic stream past him. And then, by being at the right place at the right time, by happenstance, in fact, George succeeds at removing an animal carcass from the engine of Jenny’s car.

Many generational novels fail as literature due to their epistolary presentation of annoying social commentary. The shelves are full of millennial stories with characters clawing their way toward social acceptance and financial stability in a world soaked in unjust class, race, and gender conformations. The protagonists in many of these novels may as well have neon signs flashing above them either their victimhood or, in the case of the antagonists, the inequity of their success. Greathead’s The Book of George does not succumb to this faddish technique. The characters in her novel are nuanced, not pigeonholed into a generational milieu by gender or situation, and brilliantly designed to present a portrait of their positions in the world that a reader can experience without an accompanying lecture. Great novels about generations do this with their characters. For examples, one need only think about Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, both of them flawed, haunted by inner turmoil, and trapped in their lost generation. While Greathead has not yet reached the literary status of a Hemingway or Fitzgerald, she is certainly on the road there.

No one trait defines George or Jenny. They are trapped in their millennial age, each of them pulled apart in different ways by turmoil that they create themselves in most cases. Greathead’s prose beautifully paints their portraits, always focused on their individual strengths and weaknesses. Her depictions are never overdone or sensational. One can easily identify with George’s skirmishes with anger and Jenny’s deeply irrational love for George. The novel takes place over several decades but Greathead’s extraordinary talent leaves the reader with the sense it has just been one long moment in time, like a viewing of a masterpiece hanging in a museum. And what a subtle irony Greathead creates at the end of the novel with her brilliantly masterful depiction of George finally doing something right. In the end, the reader wants to go back to the first page and read the entire novel again in order to soak up all the delicate images hiding in Greathead’s words.