So I think Gen Z is going to resurrect the social novel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fashionable young women in the 19th century read Jane Austen as a form of escapist social commentary, and contemporary novels were generally dismissed as vapid/time-wasting brainrot by aristocratic parents who wanted to see their daughters embroidering and memorizing Virgil in order to succeed in marriage. Austen was a pressure-release valve from the intense strictures of society. Gens Z and alpha desperately need books that present meaningful and knowing diversions from all the (para)social noise.

This will be the resurgence of the popular social novel everyone’s so terrified will never come. There is no shortage of appetite for stories meaningfully told — even at length. Kids will have no problem managing the attention for a book that speaks to them like Austen’s spoke to young women on the marriage mart. Such a book will command attention, and perhaps arrive in such a way and at such a time that reading it will feel like a much-needed alternative to staring at or even reading anything else.

What will need to finally exceed its social container (e.g. publishing, higher ed, the scroll, validated dopamine addiction) in order for such a novel to arrive in the world remains unseen.