It all started, as it so often does for literary millennials, with Sally Rooney.
In 2021, the Danish literary critic Linea Maja Ernst reviewed Rooney’s novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” Ernst called it a “distinctive, clear contemporary satire” in her review for Weekendavisen, a weekly that’s long been a must-read status symbol for Denmark’s cultural elite.
But she also found parts “beige.” Rooney’s characters, who are from the same generation as Ernst, 37, had joyless sex, she wrote. Ernst panned those scenes as “low-fat kink.”
“I was being a smartass,” Ernst said, laughing at her dining room table in Copenhagen this spring. “Like: This is not actually sexy!”
Then, she got a call. A Danish publisher wanted to talk. If she didn’t like Rooney’s sex scenes, could she do it better?
Ernst’s debut novel, which is titled “Waist Deep” in English and comes out on Tuesday in the United States after a stampede through Europe, is her attempt to answer that question.
In one sense, it’s a comedy of manners. Seven adult friends spend a summer vacation hanging out in a country home. They talk, and talk, and talk. They prepare extravagant brunches and debate over elaborate dinners. They swim, they sunbathe, they tease — and their flirtations and frustrations run deep.
It’s also a riff on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In that play, four beautiful people disappear into a forest outside ancient Athens, where enchantment makes for mixed-up partnerships and shape-shifting desires. Here, in the woods of modern Denmark, Ernst’s characters also have space to think about what they want, whom they desire and how they’re living.
That’s the magic of midsummer, Ernst said: “What if the rules were suddenly — bendy?”
In “Waist Deep,” which came out in Denmark in 2024 and has been translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Ernst writes with equal parts of reverence for old friendships and arch satire as her millennial characters curate a vacation worthy of an enviable Instagram post.
The characters are professionals and artists, cis and trans, parents and childless: a cross-section of the modern Danish middle class. They’re educated. They’re beautiful. And they’re all a little lost.
They’re also having a lot of sex — real, raw and hot — at least some of which happens within a relationship.
Polyamory may be the plot device, but ennui is the engine. It loops through all of the book’s relationships as characters wonder what they would actually want — and how they would live — if they had the freedom, or courage, to choose.
That’s why “Waist Deep” is so much more profound than its first impression as a smart summer read and, perhaps, why it’s been translated into 10 languages and optioned for a movie adaptation.
“Basically, it’s just asking the question of: ‘Could love be freer?’” Ernst said. “What would happen if we wanted to live differently in our private lives?” she added. “And is it possible?”
Experiment in Living
That has been the central tension of Ernst’s life for years. She is polyamorous; her wife, Amanda Herskind Ernst, is not.
For the past decade, since the couple first matched on Tinder, that gulf felt impossible to bridge. They started out dating only each other. Herskind Ernst, 32, saw Ernst through the turmoil of working while single-parenting a child from a previous relationship; Ernst helped Herskind Ernst through a career change from midwifery to a corporate job. They loved each other fiercely, fully, they both said.
But they just love differently. Ernst said she developed crushes, sometimes almost romantic obsessions, and could fall in love with many people at once. Herskind Ernst said she was in love with only one person: Ernst.
Soon, cracks started to show.
“We were breaking up and then we just couldn’t stay away from each other,” Herskind Ernst said. “That’s our biggest and only disagreement.”
They got back together, but years later, it still doesn’t feel like they’ve “figured everything out,” Ernst said.
“Yeah, because we didn’t,” Herskind Ernst interrupted, laughing. “We just did it.”
The two were lounging in their lived-in apartment in the hipster Vesterbro neighborhood, limbs intertwined. Laughter seeped in from the courtyard of their cooperative housing building and floated past their bedroom door, to which Ernst had affixed a piece of tape with the phrase “It’s about the yearning.”
“Words to live by,” she said.
The Luxury of Moping
This sort of ennui thrums through so much of what is called, in oversimplified terms, “millennial literature.”
Once, only aristocrats had the luxury to lounge, to gossip, to wonder how to live and why. Now, so many people have so much luxury that they live like little aristocrats, reading and moping through smooth-palmed years.
In Denmark, it’s even more profound. The Nordic social model’s generous child care subsidies, vacation allowances and employment protections give most Danes the sort of possibilities available only to the wealthy in the United States.
In “Waist Deep,” like other recent novels by Dolly Alderton, Lillian Fishman and Vincenzo Latronico, the adults are still growing up — and they’re obsessed with talking about it.
That could be why there’s been such a negative reaction against millennial literature from some older readers: So many of the characters are irritating, and seem trapped in adolescence, frittering away their privileged lives.
But that could also be why these books have been such a hit in Northern Europe, several critics said: because they speak directly to a lucky but lost age group.
“This book, it’s a portrait of a generation,” Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen, a Danish literary critic, said of “Waist Deep.” Its characters, she added, are wrestling with the same questions that keep Ernst’s readers up at night — and are finding the same meaninglessness in the same luxury.
“They’re just how everyone in Denmark is,” she said, “because our middle class is just so rich.”
Erik Skyum-Nielsen, another Danish critic, described Ernst’s book as “a collective coming-of-age novel,” noting a play on words in the book’s Danish title that doesn’t translate in English. In Danish, it’s “Kun til navlen,” which translates to something like “Only to the navel.” Parents say it around lakes and pools: Stick to the shallow end.
“It’s a warning,” Skyum-Nielsen said. “But it’s also a temptation — it’s an invitation.”
‘A Talking Cure’
So many of Ernst’s characters wonder if anyone else feels the same dislocating disquiet: Is this it? Others feel the opposite as their partners and friends try to keep their options open: This is it, and it’s wonderful — why isn’t this enough for you?
There was a reason the book was so easy to write, Ernst said: “I feel like I’ve been debating it with my wife for 10 years.”
Ernst wrote the novel by hand, she said, filling a notebook in a local library. At night, Herskind Ernst read the draft and offered suggestions.
The characters became like their little finger puppets, letting the couple play out their own problems. In draft after draft, they found a way through. Suddenly, it all didn’t feel so urgent, they said.
“It kind of turned out to be kind of like a talking cure,” Ernst said.
She and Herskind Ernst got married in 2024 and, that same year, Herskind Ernst gave birth to a daughter using a donor’s sperm. Then, this March, Ernst gave birth to a son from the same donor. Now, they are a family of five.
They just moved out of Vesterbro, to a bigger place farther out. This midsummer, they won’t be running into their friends in the neighborhood as they pick up the trendy “bolle med ost” cheese sandwiches that have replaced cardamom buns as Copenhagen’s “it” snack.
But they’ll have room to grow. They don’t know what that will look like — and, like so many of Ernst’s characters, they plan to find their footing in the in-between and the unresolved.
“I want Amanda, and I want free love — and I want them both,” Ernst said, laughing. “So I’ll just live here.”
“That’s kind of where I am, too,” Herskind Ernst said. “We’re at the same crossroads, just hanging out.”
Amelia Nierenberg is a Times reporter covering international news from London.
The post ‘Could Love Be Freer?’: A Tale of Polyamory, in Literature and Life appeared first on New York Times.
