The Vanishing Genius

On time and ambition

In less than two months, my new novel, Glass Century, arrives. The writer Matthew Specktor declares it is “vigorous, confident, controlled, fiercely intelligent in every line.” Believe him! And please preorder it because preorders are extremely important for writers. I’m having a launch event May 6 at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan. More details to come.

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Sixty years ago this month, The Beach Boys Today! appeared in record stores across the country. The Beach Boys were, in 1965, one of the very few American rock acts to stand up to the British Invasion; they were not only pumping out top ten hits but innovating on the plane of the Beatles or even, arguably, beyond them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were slightly in awe of All Summer Long, which had appeared a year earlier, and while millions knew the Beach Boys for their cheery odes to surfing and hot rods, musicians understood there were other forces at play: this was an auteur’s band, and the meticulously layered sound—with its ingenuous harmonies, unexpected jazz chords, and startling array of classical instruments—was not quite like any that had been heard in popular music before. Brian Wilson, then barely out of high school, was writing, arranging, and producing these albums—such audacity, at a time of oppressive studio oversight, was unheard of—and he seemed to be, at that moment in time, an unstoppable force in pop, as if Mozart had been transported to the twentieth century and reared on rock and doo-wop. Pet Sounds remains one of the great pop albums in history, and Today!—particulary the second side—is every bit its precursor. In songs like “Please Let Me Wonder” and “Kiss Me, Baby” and “In the Back of My Mind,” Brian is at his glorious, neurotic peak, teaming with Mike Love and his swaggering younger brother, Dennis, to sing on the psychic pain that comes with young love. At the end of 1964, Brian had decided to stop touring after having a nervous breakdown on a flight to a concert. In the popular imagination, it’s Pet Sounds that came from Brian’s retreat to the studio, but the first actual product was Today! It kicked off a stunning two-year period of songwriting for Brian—you may have heard another 1965 hit of his, “California Girls”—that culminated in Pet Sounds and their million-selling single, “Good Vibrations.”

When I think of Brian, who has rightly been declared a genius, or the twin titans of the Beatles, I am always struck by the reality that all of them grew up in relative cultural backwaters. London was, and remains, the center of the British universe. If London were removed from today’s Great Britain, poverty and woe would be left behind. To have the preeminent rock band of the twentieth century be English but not of London is still hard to fathom. Londoners themselves may have been befuddled by a Liverpudlian invasion. And the Beach Boys, if of Los Angeles, were reared in the unfashionable suburb of Hawthorne, near LAX. Hawthorne is not Beverly Hills or Hollywood. Three siblings from one of its unassuming bungalow-style homes emerged to transform American pop music. The Wilsons, like Lennon and McCartney, did not attend exclusive schools or have access to any great wealth to burnish their ambitions. They had parents who took a keen interest in music, which helped, but they were, at best, working-class kids who might have ended up in the machining business like their father if rock music never worked out.

When I consider the geniuses of that era—or any, really, before the last ten years or so—I think of time. Talented children, until the incursion of the smartphone and immersive videos games, had much of it. For hundreds of years, there was a consensus among parents: you fed and loved your children but also left them alone. Children in the nineteenth century were expected to work—it is good we have child labor laws today—and children of the twentieth century, if more protected, were still assumed to have their own agency. I am intrigued, talking to middle-aged people today, by what childhood once looked like. Children of the 1960s and 1970s, for the most part, carved out their own worlds, and they were expected to live out much of their day without a great amount of oversight. Kids walked to school alone, rode the train alone, met up at the mall alone, and screwed around without much intercession from mom and dad. They attended the local public schools and if they had any interest in college, they put in their applications without a lot of assistance from their parents. There were, of course, overbearing parents—the Wilsons had one in Murry, their first manager, who verbally and physically harassed them—but even there, limitations arose.

The most significant was technology. There were no means to track children. And, more crucially, children could only be enchanted by gizmos and gadgets for so long. The television was stationary, rooted in the living room, and it might have only featured a few channels, depending on the decade. Movies, similarly, were confined to physical theaters. Even in my own childhood, in the 1990s and 2000s, video gaming was largely a social activity. I brought my friend over to play Nintendo Wii or we went to his house to battle in a Dragon Ball Z video game on the PlayStation 2. Unique among my peers, I didn’t own a video game console until I was a teenager, and this meant, to my benefit, I had a childhood free of such seductions. I recently finished Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, a marvelous novel that is something of an instruction manual on how to, possibly, a raise a child. DeWitt’s protagonists are Sybilla, an American Oxford graduate living in London, and her absurdly precocious son, Ludo. Ludo is, in every sense, a genius, able to read Japanese and Greek and Arabic in early childhood while mastering physics, biology, and host of other academic subjects. He is home-schooled, in part, because he is too superior for ordinary school, and Sybilla has her own expansive theories on childrearing: she believes that any child, like John Stuart Mill, can be exposed to exceedingly difficult subject matter when they are young and taught to master it. Sybilla, for all her ambition, is not a helicopter parent. She instructs Ludo plenty, but she also has a day job as a typist. She is often distracted. Ludo wanders off on his own, riding the London Underground with his many books, and he eventually embarks on a quest to find out who is father might be. (Sybilla refuses to tell him.)

The Last Samurai is set in the 1990s—Ludo is born around 1987, placing him in my generational cohort—and what is missing is any sort of advanced technology to knock Ludo back. If he had been so inclined, he could have had a Game Boy (I had one) and these were certainly addictive. But the Game Boy, with its pixelated screen and limited gameplay, could only hold you for so long. When I look back on my own childhood, which was not at all like Ludo’s, I realize how many hours, mentally, I was forced to fill, and how this might have unwittingly paved the way for future success. My parents fretted over me far more than their parents fretted over them—my father, a child of the Silent Generation, once told me his mother’s favorite expression was “go play lose me”—but they were not inclined to meticulously manage my young life. I was not exactly Huckleberry Finn—I played organized baseball, took cello lessons, and saw a math tutor because my algebra skills were so poor—and I had plenty of structured time. I am thankful, though, that technology had accelerated only so much for my childhood. I recall hours spent on a living room floor playing with action figures, dreaming up whole narratives to explain how they’d come into combat. I took it quite seriously; I invented backstories in my mind, sprawling sagas, and implemented them as much as I could through plastic warfare. I liked to invent. I recall, around age ten, dreaming up another fifty or so new Pokémon. I had a sketch book and drew them out, imagining their appearances, hit points, and various attributes. This felt like vital work.

And in retrospect, it was. I consider, now, the sheer amount of invention that went into my childhood. Rooftop games of imaginary baseball, the pretend Pokémon, the daydreams of Tekken fighters locked in new narratives that the video games never foresaw. I never lacked the time to think. Though I had no sense, then, I wanted to be a writer, I was unwittingly building a foundation for such work. Childhood felt creative because it had to be—because television or a Game Boy Color could only entrance for so long. Even my college experience, in retrospect, was liberatory and rather tech-free, and there was a striking amount artistic ferment around me. I attended Stony Brook University, a state school on eastern Long Island, and I was surrounded by plenty of working and middle-class kids, the sort who occupied the same class position as the Wilson boys of Hawthorne. That was, in essence, not very different than my own class position, since I’m the child of federal employees, the first in their own families to graduate college. At Stony Brook, I knew multiple kids attempting novels. Music was everywhere; my close friends were in a rock band, and bands were constantly forming in the arts-oriented quad I moved into sophomore year. Some were more serious than others, and several went into the city frequently to play shows. A popular music showcase was formed on campus just to accommodate all of these bands. Unable to play music well or sing, I contended myself as a fan, and spent a very brief spell, at eighteen, managing my friend’s band. All these bands, including my friend’s, played original music. Songwriters were always spilling out of our drab dorm buildings. I wrote fiction in my free time and went through a short, feverish period of experimenting with pastels, trying and failing to create visual art that matched my curious ideals. In my senior year, I founded a literary magazine, Spoke the Thunder. If I was ever bored, I attempted to create something.

The running theme here is time: most of us had flip phones or very early iPhones, and they were not yet capable of stealing attention. Social media was not mobile, and it was only Facebook. The Facebook of that era was a mere compendium of a life well-lived in meatspace; the Millennial move was to throw up photos of yourself drinking or hanging out with friends, and then scrawl jokey comments underneath. The concept of this taking over actual life seemed silly. I wonder, had I been born ten or twelve years later, if I would have properly conditioned myself for the work I pursue now. Would I have my ability to sit alone and think? Would I have the habit of writing instead of streaming and scrolling? I don’t know. There are more than enough scientific and mathematical geniuses wandering the world today; my growing fear is that we’ve created a society that is stifling cultural and artistic genius. Yes, we don’t value the arts or support them enough financially, but the crisis may run deeper than that. It’s all about time: what does the Brian Wilson of 2025 do with his weekends? Brian was a preternaturally gifted child who deconstructed vocal harmonies on the radio and spent hours over his piano. A child today with such genius might tinker around with music but devote far more of his days to Minecraft, Fortnite, and MrBeast. The child might drown in a sludge bath of AI. The same could be true of the budding novelists, poets, and painters. All of these technologies are arrayed against dreams and imagination. The content—the YouTube, the video games, the TikTok videos—does all the imagining for you. The brain devolves into a vessel for passive consumption. Adults, too, have been losing the war. Millennial novelists are not publishing as much as their predecessors and technological distraction can at least be partially blamed. Not long ago, the writer Mo Diggs argued, rather provocatively, that internet culture has yet to birth greatness. I am optimistic for tomorrow—the nascent Romantic revival promises more ambition and creativity than we’ve witnessed over the last decade—but it’s hard to consider the cultural heft of the twentieth century and how much catching up we have.

I do not have children. One day, I might. In the meantime, I find myself forming opinions about parenting. The evolution of modern parenting somewhat perplexes me. For hundreds—if not thousands—of years, parents loved their children but understood they must learn to be adults. There were fewer entertainments designed specifically for children. Children played with other children as adults socialized with adults. The wealthiest parents or a hereditary elite might have sweated more over their offspring, engineering pathways to choice boarding schools and universities or at least a European grand tour, and many would arrange marriages. Still, even there, children evolved sans any of the monomaniacal surveillance undertaken now, especially by middle-class and affluent American parents. Parents plan for their child’s K-12 and college education like mad generals plotting military campaigns. They wield smartphone technology to track their child’s whereabouts at all hours of the day and night. They neurotically craft the child’s day, with most activities designed to boost the child’s chances of attending an exclusive high school and college. Learning for learning’s sake—or the idea, perhaps, that latent creativity and even genius might be nurtured—is derided or outright disdained.

And I think, watching these children from afar, that almost none of them are going to conceive the next Pet Sounds or Song of Solomon or Mulholland Drive. For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century? Much of the mass culture then, high and middle, was birthed, with little exaggeration, in unremarkable New York City public schools. Here’s one era: Paul Simon (Forest Hills HS ‘59, with Art Garfunkel), Carole King (James Madison HS ‘58), Barbra Streisand (Erasmus Hall HS ‘59), Neil Diamond (Lincoln HS ‘58, and attended Erasmus with Streisand), Barry Manilow (Easten District HS ‘61), David Geffen (New Utrecht HS ‘60), and Tony Visconti (New Utrecht HS ‘60). Gerry Goffin went to the more selective Brooklyn Tech and graduated in 1957. Lou Reed grew up in the nearby Long Island suburb of Freeport and graduated Freeport High in 1959. If you’re looking for literary lions, the city public schools have a few, including Arthur Miller (Lincoln HS ‘32), James Baldwin (attended DeWitt Clinton HS), Cynthia Ozick (Hunter College HS ‘46), and Norman Mailer (Boys High ‘39). This is not an argument for sending your precious offspring to neighborhood New York schools—no school anywhere has magic genius fairy dust to make your child into a generational talent—but it is a reminder that these men and women all had parents who behaved very differently than today’s spiritual technocrats. All of these giants, in their youth, had time to dream—and dream grandly. What kind of time do children have now? What about teenagers? Twenty-somethings? Brian Wilson once called music God’s voice and I mull this occasionally, the link between art and divinity and the purpose of a human life. If we want to give honor to something greater than ourselves, we must not squander the potential we do have, the genius we might harbor. To do so would be, if not a sin against creation, then a tragedy. And an avoidable one.