BOOMERS

A cultural critic offers a takedown of baby boomers.

In a book modeled on Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), Andrews delivers a millennial’s arguments against the boomers and their lofty ideals. Though the author’s idea is well conceived, the narrative suffers from disorganization and conservative pieties. Rather than broadly attacking a vast and complex generation, Andrews wisely sets her sights on six well-known targets: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. These figures give the author the opportunity to tee off on many of her bêtes noires, including Silicon Valley, school busing, and the idea that pop culture should be taken seriously. The narrative is a loosely organized collection of essays, the best of which is the one about Sorkin, in a fairly conservative intellectual vein; it’s well researched and written with brio and attitude but not enough cohesion. A few of these pieces loop back to the boomer premise in only the most superficial way, with a paragraph about boomers inserted seemingly as an afterthought. Andrews lays out her case clearly in the preface: “They inherited prosperity, social cohesion and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy….The boomers should not be allowed to shuffle off the world stage until they have been made to regret” their failures. The prose is mostly engaging, but sometimes the author simply misses the mark—e.g., when she tries to take down James Baldwin: “Baldwin’s writing was inspired not by oppression but by his personal neuroses…his error was to project his pain onto the black experience.” Were Baldwin still alive, he might remind Andrews that he’s not a boomer. For a more incisive exploration of the millennial-boomer rift, try Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even (2020).

Andrews is fair in much of her criticism, but one wishes for a more cogent argument.