Review: Boomer1

To some members of the millennial generation, whose formative experiences have included the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the economic hangover from the Great Recession of 2008-09, the relative ease with which their baby boomer parents have moved through life might seem especially galling. Feeding that resentment is the fact that many of those same boomers refuse to step out of the working world into retirement. That's the fuel to which Daniel Torday (The Last Flight of Poxl West) applies his satiric match in Boomer1.
 
Torday's novel follows two millennials--Mark Brumfeld and Cassie Black--one-time lovers and fellow bluegrass band members in Brooklyn, N.Y. Mark is a former editor at a glossy magazine in Midtown Manhattan, with a Ph.D. in English literature that has yet to land him an academic job, while Cassie works as a fact-checker for Us Weekly. After Cassie rejects his marriage proposal and with his economic prospects plummeting, Mark decides to move back to his family's home in suburban Baltimore, taking up residence in the basement.
 
Following an encounter on the basketball court with an entitled boomer, Mark takes on a new identity as "Boomer1" or "Isaac Abramson," the latter an allusion to the biblical narrative of the patriarch Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son at God's command. He soon begins to craft a series of "Boomer Missives" on YouTube, railing against the predecessor generation "who had what he wanted, who in their geologic later years had petrified until they were protecting all the natural resources." Mark's videos spark a movement of "Boomer Boomers," who support their ROWRY ("retire or we'll retire you") demand with increasingly brazen electronic guerrilla warfare.
 
The tension of Mark's return home plays out against the character of his mother, Julia, once a musician in the San Francisco of the 1960s, who's in the process of losing her hearing. Meanwhile, Cassie finds her career and life moving in the opposite direction. She gets a job as research director at a website called RazorWire, creating "native content," a cross between advertising and news, and finds a new lover.
 
A skilled satirist, Torday takes a premise rooted in the real world and, with only a modest bump, sets it spinning into chaos for his characters. Mark becomes dismayed as he visits chat rooms on the Dark Web and watches imitators don David Crosby masks and deliver impassioned manifestos in front of upside-down posters of Jerry Garcia. When this ragtag movement lurches toward violent confrontation, his consternation is matched only by his unrequited ardor for Cassie. Torday has his finger on the pulse of American society in the 21st century, and he smartly suggests that when it comes to relationships between the generations, the patient may not be in the best of health. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
 
Shelf Talker: Daniel Torday tackles the issue of generational conflict in 21st-century America in a sharp satire.
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