Malavika Kannan Is Writing Gen Z Into the Record
When Malavika Kannan was sent home after only six months of college, she turned to campus novels as a form of escape. Reading about enclosed academic worlds allowed her to revisit what the pandemic had abruptly taken away. But when she began imagining a campus novel of her own in the fall of 2021, escaping the pandemic no longer felt sufficient. She wanted to write directly through it.
“We had gone through a really significant shared generational experience,” Kannan told GEN-ZiNE. She felt that it was “the role of writers to process it in some way.”
The result is Unprecedented Times, Kannan’s new literary novel, released today by Henry Holt and Co. The novel follows Rishi, an 18-year-old former climate activist who arrives at Stanford in the fall of 2019 determined to become a writer, experiment with love, and build a life beyond the expectations of her Indian American upbringing. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dismantles the future she had imagined.
Kannan’s novel is not simply a story about COVID-19. It is about a generation that learned to narrate itself online, mobilized around political crises, and was promised that leaving home would produce independence. Then, almost overnight, those expectations collapsed. Through Rishi’s friendships, desires, political disillusionment, and evolving relationship with her mother, Unprecedented Times asks what remains when the stories young people tell about themselves stop matching their lives.
When Experience Becomes a Story
Rishi enters college not only wanting to experience life, but also anticipating how she might eventually write about it. That instinct feels particularly familiar to a generation raised online, where experiences can become captions, posts, personal brands, and stories almost as quickly as they occur.
Kannan is careful, however, not to treat Rishi as a symbol for every member of Gen Z. “Gen Z is not a monolith,” she said, emphasizing that Rishi’s way of moving through the world is distinctly her own. Still, she believes the internet encourages people to narrativize their lives.
Rishi’s fluency in the language of identity, politics, and self-analysis is partly a product of that environment. Yet having the words to describe an experience does not necessarily mean having control over it. For Kannan, this creates one of the novel’s central tensions: “Language and the ability to narrate experience is not the same thing as power or agency or understanding.”
That tension shaped the book’s form as much as its subject. Kannan initially experimented with third person and with a retrospective first-person narrator who would recount the story from the future. Neither approach felt right. A future narrator seemed pressured to explain what everything meant, offering clarity that Rishi does not possess while living through the events.
Kannan eventually chose first-person present tense, restricting readers to what Rishi can see, feel, and understand in each moment. The decision allows readers to disagree with Rishi’s interpretation of her own life. Instead of resolving the conflict between narrative and experience, Kannan leaves that uncertainty intact.
“I did not want to solve it on the page,” she explained. “I wanted to give that up to the reader.”
The Myth of Independence
Like many young people, Rishi arrives at college expecting reinvention. The idea that adulthood begins by leaving home at 18, however, is culturally specific and often inaccessible. Kannan describes it as a deeply American ideal, one that treats independence as both an achievement and a clean break from the people and circumstances that formed us.
Unprecedented Times complicates that fantasy. Rishi attempts to define herself against her mother, but physical distance does not erase their connection. Their relationship is marked by love, conflict, and what Kannan calls “a degree of incomprehensibility.” Rishi cannot determine whether the distance between them comes from culture, generation, personality, mental illness, or some combination of all four. She wants her mother’s acceptance while also struggling to extend that same understanding in return.
The novel ultimately rejects rugged independence as a realistic goal. Rishi continues to need her mother, just as she needs her friends. Her coming of age is not a journey toward complete self-sufficiency, but toward recognizing the relationships and circumstances from which the self is made.
College gives Rishi access to people with dramatically different experiences of race, class, family, and political life. Her friends become windows into other ways of living, but they also carry their own disappointments. Kannan particularly enjoyed writing these relationships between “really earnest, queer young people” who want to understand one another, even when they lack the skills or stability to do so.
The book resists the idea that Gen Z is uniquely incapable of connection. Kannan remains wary of sweeping, doom-filled claims about an entire generation. Still, she acknowledges that COVID-19 disrupted embodied community and deprived many young people of experiences through which intimacy and conflict-resolution skills ordinarily develop.
Against that alienation, the characters seek intense forms of closeness. In one of Kannan’s favorite scenes, Rishi and her roommate Georgia tell each other their entire life stories during a long walk. It is the kind of recognition many people want profoundly: to be understood by another person in full.
After the Activist Generation Lost Faith
Before college, Rishi was part of the youth climate movement. Her political history reflects the wave of organizing that emerged during the first Trump presidency, including the youth-led movements against gun violence and climate change. Kannan participated in that political moment as a teenager in Florida, organizing with movements including March for Our Lives and the Women’s March.
She wrote Rishi partly to challenge the narrative that Gen Z has always been detached or apathetic. “Many of us did, in fact, serve our time and make a considerable attempt to improve this country,” Kannan said. For many young organizers, those efforts eventually produced exhaustion and disillusionment rather than the transformation they had imagined.
The novel does not offer a prediction about where that disillusionment will lead. Instead, it chronicles what Kannan calls a broader “vibe shift,” marked by political polarization, climate anxiety, economic decline, and a diminishing faith in American institutions. In the second half of the novel, Rishi and her friends begin searching for other ways to practice their politics through communal living, queerness, and their interpersonal relationships.
Their question is no longer simply how to change the world. It is how to build a meaningful life when changing the world begins to feel impossible.
A Generation Without a Grieving Circle
For Kannan, the pandemic’s deepest effects on young people remain insufficiently discussed. Public conversations about Gen Z often diagnose, criticize, or ridicule the generation from a distance. What is missing is an honest conversation “with the goal of repair as opposed to critique.”
When Kannan returned to Stanford, she felt there should have been a collective grieving circle for what students had experienced. Some had lost relatives. Some had become disabled. Many had endured isolation, online conflict, and what she described as the “social carnage” of 2020. Yet students returned to an environment where projecting confidence was routine, often without realizing how many people around them were still suffering.
That unprocessed grief gives Unprecedented Times its urgency. Kannan wanted fiction to hold not only the public facts of the pandemic, but also its quiet interior changes. During revision, she decided against skipping over the pandemic’s earliest months. Rendering that period directly taught her “how to write motion in fiction that is driven by a character’s interiority, and not just by the movement of people and events in a plot.”
Kannan hopes the novel will endure as a period piece documenting major shifts in American culture. Yet its central concerns reach beyond one historical moment: the desire for agency, the instability of identity, and the hope that language might allow another person to understand us.
Friends have already told Kannan that the novel is the first time they have seen their experiences rendered in literary prose. Gen Z life has appeared across social media and television, but fiction offers something different: the space to remain inside an experience long enough to encounter its contradictions.
Kannan’s advice to young writers is appropriately unromantic. “Writing is like going to the gym,” she said. “It’s a muscle that you have to build up with practice.” She recommends keeping a diary of observations, impressions, and experiences, developing the habit of turning the surrounding world into language.
With Unprecedented Times, Kannan has followed her own advice. She has placed a generation’s interior life on the page, not to explain it away, but to let its confusion, intimacy, grief, and unfinished questions remain visible.