Publisher's Weekly Review
Torday (The Last Flight of Poxl West) constructs a hilarious story about generational conflict brought to a boiling point. Mark Brumfeld-a former journalist, bluegrass guitarist, and current English literature PhD candidate-is frustrated with the slow economy and job market, which he blames the baby boomers for. To allay his frustrations, Mark creates a web video series to encourage baby boomers to vacate their jobs, and for millennials to be ready to take them-by force, if necessary. But what started as catharsis quickly morphs into a domestic terrorist organization aimed at pushing boomers out of the workforce. The story is told through the perspectives of Mark; his ex-girlfriend Cassie, a punk bassist who remakes herself in new media; and Mark's mother, Julia, a former wild-child turned suburban wife. Following the overeducated and underemployed, Torday traces the progress of radical thought from its foothold in the passionate young minds during the 1960s to its eventual domestication and corporatization. As tensions rise, the people in Mark's life find themselves facing difficult questions about the accessibility of success and what it means to prevail in a system where so few manage to do so. While the ending feels anticlimactic, Torday's wry examination of those attempting to survive in postrecession America is particularly poignant. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
After his academic job search, his journalistic career, and his marriage proposal go down in flames, an angry young man moves into his mother's basement and starts a radical movement that pits millennials against baby boomers.Cassie and Mark, both bluegrass musicians, meet at a gig in Williamsburg, where "maybe fifty bespectacled recent college grads milled around drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from the can and Miller High Life from the bottle." Cassie reflexively rebuffs Mark's friendly overtures, fearing that her girlfriend will notice and take umbrage. (Perhaps girlfriend is not the right word. "They lived together in a kind of Heiddegarian phenomenological relationship present, in which only the present moment of drinking or playing music or fucking existed, an immediate Dasein of mutually undecided and uncommented-upon cathexis, Eros and lust.") Despite Cassie's lack of enthusiasm, the two soon find themselves in a band, a relationship, and a shared apartment. But shortly after Mark gets her a fact-checking gig at the glossy magazine where he's on staff, their lives take starkly different turns. He loses his job, spends a year writing an essay on Emma Goldman that no one reads, then makes a financial and romantic mistake so serious he is forced to move home to Baltimore. There, he puts on a David Crosby mask, sets himself up in front of an upside-down poster of Jerry Garcia, and begins to issue YouTube screeds against baby boomers. His message: Retire now, greedy pigs, and free up the jobs for us. The videos go viral. Cassie, meanwhile, is riding a wave of good luck. She's become Director of Research at a new media company called RazorWire and is having a passionate relationship with a brilliant female co-worker. The money is fantastic even if the job is something less than that, fact-checking articles like "Seventeen Great New Recipes That Use Splenda Instead of Sugar." But when Mark, now known as Boomer1, loses control of his movement, bad things start to happen, first to Bob Weir, Eddie Bauer, Jann Wenner, and the AARP. Torday's (The Last Flight of Poxl West, 2015) gifts as a writer are brilliantly displayed in the details of Cassie's and Mark's inner and outer worlds. A third main character, Mark's mother, is not as compelling, and when this ambitious social novel comes to rest with her, it loses some steam.Stylishly written, cleverly observed, and boldly imagined. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
MILLENNIAL SOCIOPATHY is a pathology coined in a fictional New York Times column in "Boomerl," Daniel Torday's wry third work of fiction. Torday's self-appointed millennial spokesman is Mark Brumfield, a 31-year-old ex-journalist with a Ph.D. We follow him from the heights of youthful ambition in pre-9/11 Brooklyn to the subterranean lows of his parents' suburban Baltimore basement. Set in 2011, the novel reimagines the Occupy movement as an explicitly intergenerational conflict: millennials hitting back at the profligacy of baby boomers in a campaign of "domestic terrorism," waged largely online and coalescing around one bitter, balding man whose mother still makes his sandwiches. Wearied by rejection, unable to secure a tenure-track professorship, Mark's confined to making his "mark" through nostalgic covers of bluegrass music and factchecking other people's articles. But all that changes with his rebirth as the anarchist activist Isaac Abramson, whose online avatar is Boomerl. In place of academic lectures, Mark records himself ranting at his laptop, composing "Boomer Missives" that are part white-male entitlement, part righteous rage. The rants go viral and Mark's vocation turns out to be fracking the internet's subsurface anger. Ultimately the movement eclipses him in terms of editorial control, but as its frontman he becomes "one of the most notorious revolutionaries in the U.S. since Weatherman." Where the 9/11 attacks were set against the Manhattan skyline, Mark's backdrop is an upside-down poster of Jerry Garcia. Hiding behind his computer, learning the lingo of chat rooms frequented by the anonymous hacking group Silence, Mark feels invincible, freed from the hole he's fallen into IRL and finally endowed with purpose. But his trajectory is interwoven with those of his mother, Julia, and his former girlfriend Cassie. It's through their eyes that we see his naiveté and delusion: He's as blind to Cassie's true identity (she's gay) as he is to Julia's pre-motherhood past, and it's his misguided marriage proposal that necessitates a maternal reunion. Another miscalculation, involving a ring purchased with Disney stocks, means he now owes the I.R.S. Ironically, the erstwhile fact-checker sees an inattention to detail as the gulf between himself and his followers, who type faster but have zero grasp of grammar or nuance. Mark is both exhilarated and terrified by his doxxing disciples, who indiscriminately target an entire middle-aged demographic for the problems of late-stage capitalism. It's hard to tell where the book's sympathies lie - it reads as contemporary satire with Shakespearean echoes - but the baby boomers' own verdict is "meshugas." Torday reveals the artificiality of all identity markers, from given names to generational monikers. Julia even doubts Mark's credentials as a millennial given that he was born in 1980. As Mark rants about unemployment, Cassie cashes in at a new media company; their parallel lives expose the ambivalence in a generation seen as both entitled and self-loathing. Though she shares Mark's rage, Cassie also believes "demographics are dumb." In her view, people don't conform to stereotype. Like Mark and Julia, Cassie is a contradiction: both punk and pedant. Mark condescends to his Luddite mother, yet accepts the old-fashioned distinction between offline and digital selves. Julia, once a radical '60s musician, is increasingly conservative, and deaf. Her reliance on lip-reading (and thus resistance to complexity) enacts a silence Torday implicitly compares to the Silence hackers. The word "reflexive," one of Torday's tics, aptly describes the behavior of both movements, young and old. Many of the book's best passages explore the collapsing of time - decaying leaves become "a synaptic palimpsest" - and from the old songs Mark and Cassie cover to the new names they take, the hybridization of past and present permeates the novel, complicating any division between "us" and "them." OLIVIA SUDJIC is the author of "Sympathy."
Library Journal Review
In his provocative second novel (after The Last Flight of Poxl West), Torday takes the idea of generational warfare a step further. When 31-year-old Mark -Brumfeld-overeducated, underemployed, and freshly rejected by his bandmate and would-be fiancée Cassie-moves back to his parents' house in Baltimore to lick his wounds, he channels his frustration into a series of furious "Boomer Missives" under the moniker Boomer1, replete with meme-ready calls to action: "Boom boom." "Retire or we'll retire you." "Resist much, obey little." Soon Mark's rants spawn copycats who turn his catchphrases into tangible action, manipulating American media and threatening retaliation. As the story moves toward a violent climax, Mark's ex-girlfriend Cassie, who has begun a lucrative career in new media, and his mother, Julia, a product of the 1960s with her own history of rebellion, both struggle to reconcile their sympathies with his beliefs with the true damage his videos have wrought. VERDICT Torday's novel is smart and culturally attuned, but its satirical edge suffers from a split narrative that leaves its protagonist too often a spectator to the movement he created. For fans of Nathan Hill's The Nix and Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens. [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
