Zadie Smith and the Children of the Seventies

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Generation X is usually defined as people born between 1965 and 1980. But writers who grew up in the 1970s have a distinctive sensibility formed in part by reacting against the myths and icons of Gen X. Zadie Smith shares the skeptical, deflationary instincts of the children of the Seventies. Open-mindedness, even to the point of moral ambiguity, is one of the chief values Smith shares with her literary contemporaries, who came of age in the post-Cold War 1990s and tend to feel out of place in today’s political world. Their literary gaze was fixed within at an early age, and they continue to believe that the most authentic way to write about history is as the deteriorating climate through which the self moves. And the self is to be regarded with mistrust—a reaction against the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of their elders.</jats:p>