My interest is always political, and this project started when I was in college and was part of a left-wing student group organizing against a prospective tuition hike.

I definitely didn’t come from a first-person or anecdotal/journalistic perspective. I went back to the Bard’s source material in Plutarch and it was even more stark-Mark Brutus reads younger there, even, than he does in the play. First, I was reading a bunch of Shakespeare for my last novel, and while I was in the early acts of a read of Julius Caesar, something about the way Mark Brutus and Cassius talked about Caesar just sounded so much like the strife between millennials and boomers. Malcolm Harris: What made you want to write about this set of conflicts in particular?ĭaniel Torday: I kind of came at this novel from two separate disparate spaces.

Harris and Torday spoke over email about generational conflict, Karl Marx, and the resonances (and divergences) between their books. In Daniel Torday’s new novel, Boomer1, thirty-something academic Mark Brumfeld is forced by debt and lack of work to move back into his parents’ basement, where he goes viral recording videos that rail against Baby Boomers’ stranglehold on the job market. Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days is a nonfiction account of the dire straits so many millennials find themselves in today: maligned as entitled and lazy, millennials are poorer and more precariously employed than their parents and grandparents all while facing a shrinking social safety net.

Boomer1 by daniel torday