Why Do Modern Novels All Feel the Same Now?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Can anybody at all please help me understand why all modern novels must feel so modern? I'm not talking about the mention of phones. I'm not talking about the mention of social media. I'm not talking about anything that could bind the narrative or the characters or what they think to our present day with obvious tropes like those. I'm talking about the mind of the author clearly being shaped by the same forces that all of us today are shaped by. I just finished Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad.

[00:00:25]Came out in 2024. It's on the surface about putting on Hamlet in the West Bank, but it's really about the arc of a family and a British Palestinian actress chasing her lineage and her shared history with people living there acting out the play. But what I was just struck by I I was reminded of the tweet that is very funny but has a lot of truth to it, which was certain actors in period pieces that have come out in the last 5 years having iPhone face. What that to me illustrates is the indelible mark of not the 21st century, not modernity, not even the advent of modern technology, but something about this moment that we're in.

[00:01:00]I think it's about our constant monitoring of ourselves. The you know, the digital panopticon, however you want to refer to it. But the sense that we are always being perceived, I think of that as a part of it. I think that's what actually leads to the iPhone face concept is that we're all used to having cameras on us at all times. But I have much less understanding of how a modern novel as in sometimes situated in the last two to five years, they always feel so stuck in that period to me and I can't separate them. I also felt this way about Martyr by Kaveh Akbar, which is another very popular recent novel. I think it's from 2025.

[00:01:33]That novel I found to be sort of a clip art or a montage cut together very choppily at basically Tumblr level paragraph or sentence length insights.

[00:01:43]They're just sort of cobbled together and that reminded me of how people scroll on this app incidentally unless you're watching this long video or Twitter or something like that and engage with short-form content. It was like short-form content compiled into a novel. This one was slightly more mystifying to me. There's no doubt that Isabella Hammad is a real talent. I enjoyed the novel. I liked it. I wonder what other books come to your mind that seem this way, or if I'm even barking up the right tree, as it were, at all.