SO OLD, SO YOUNG, by Grant Ginder
In case you have missed the many articles on the topic, millennials are reaching middle age. The entire generation is now officially over 30, with the eldest turning 45 this year. As a result, I predict a tidal wave of new novels grappling with that fact; call them coming-of-middle-age novels.
Grant Ginder’s “So Old, So Young,” about friends who met at the University of Pennsylvania navigating careers and families, while drifting apart over the course of almost two decades, is a tender and amiable early entry to the genre.
Ginder brings a flair for detail to the material — the book is precise on what everyone is listening to, reading and wearing — and is especially fun when he sends up millennial gatherings: Halloween parties with semi-ironic group costumes, weddings with tortured themes. (“Formal Hacienda Chic” is the dress code that more than one attendee observes “feels racist.”)
The book begins by announcing the death of a core character without telling the reader which one. It is 2024 and Mia, a journalist, is flying to New York from London, where she has been living for about six months. The stranger in the next seat attempts to buy her a drink with the remark, “We need to lighten you up, missy! … It’s not like someone’s died, now, is it?” Mia’s reply makes for a slightly silly cliffhanger: “Actually?” she says. “They have.”
Then we flash back to Manhattan on New Year’s Eve of 2007. Mia has arrived at a party at a crummy Lower East Side apartment with her roommates, Sasha, an impulsive and beautiful gallery girl, and Adam, a thoughtful and painfully careful young gay man who was orphaned as a kid and raised by an aunt.
The grit is familiar — 20-somethings improvise drinking games in a sticky corner, Flo Rida plays from “an upside-down iPod in a red Solo cup.” As the meme goes, there’s not a cellphone in sight. We also meet Richie and Marco, who are hosting, and Theo, Sasha’s longtime boyfriend, whose steadiness both bores and attracts her.
Adam and Richie hook up at this party, as do Marco and Mia. The book cycles through points of view; Ginder’s kaleidoscopic rendering of petty friend-group drama is pleasing, a low-stakes “Rashomon.”
Jump forward seven years to the hacienda wedding: A tertiary friend from college is getting married in Cancún and the group has been instructed to “fiesta, siesta, repeat.” But no one has a good time: Mia and Marco have broken up, and Marco has brought along his new girlfriend. Richie is still partying like he’s 25 — falling into swimming pools, blacking out — but the charm has worn off. The magic of 2007, the reader is meant to understand, has curdled or run its course.
The time jumps continue to a vacation rental in the Hamptons and a Halloween party in suburban New Jersey, each one marking a small shift in life phases. The characters hit all the midlife milestones (babies, real estate), fight among themselves, sometimes make up and sometimes don’t. As often happens in multi-voice novels, the shifting narrators vary in verve, but Ginder switches them up frequently enough to keep us engaged.
Most affecting is the story of Richie, the party boy turned alcoholic. We watch him struggle with addiction, struggle in his relationship with Adam, struggle even to allow his friends to forgive him. Late in the book, sobriety remains a fragile state: “What was today,” he thinks, “if not a day to spectacularly fall apart?”
The worst that can be said about this novel is that it seems, at times, Netflix-ready (one of Ginder’s previous books, “The People We Hate at the Wedding,” did become a streaming movie in 2022). It is a bit pat, a bit digestible. Its structure — the manufactured mystery up front of who has died — recalls the suspense-building tactics of shows like “The White Lotus.”
But these are small issues with a novel that is mostly a very good time. I gulped it down on a plane, taking breaks to recall my own friend group from college. The people who are your real friends, the novel invites us to remember, often drive you completely crazy. There is a note of optimism running through “So Old, So Young” — the wobbly notion that the relationships forged by circumstance in youth mean something in the end.
Admirably, Ginder never forces the idea too hard. Did we matter to the kids we drank with, and did they matter to us? Here’s hoping.
SO OLD, SO YOUNG | By Grant Ginder | Gallery/Scout Press | 384 pp. | $30
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