Artwork by Maddie Shaw. 

Analogue #2: Is It Time for a New “New Sincerity?”

Polly Barton’s 2026 debut novel, What Am I, A Deer?, begins with the hot-faced memory of a grade-school talent show. Our narrator, age twelve, has decided to transform herself into Céline Dion for a performance of “Pour que tu m'aimes encore.” Although she only has a few months of French behind her, she knows the song is “very desperate and very romantic.” But, just as she is about to step on stage, her teachers discover that her music won’t play, and her background dancers quit, “because not only is it not cool to sing solo but it’s also not cool to be seen with someone so disastrously uncool.” Our narrator takes the stage alone, donning her mother’s ill-fitting gold slip and holding a hairbrush as a microphone. Unashamedly, she sings her French song a cappella in front of the entire school.

Her fellow classmates admire her for it. “What you did on that stage—when you overlook the part with the satin nightie which even very shortly afterwards starts to seem a bit weird and salacious—was to expose the very nerdiest part of you…which, if it were a colour, you feared would be sort of brown,” the narrator reflects sometime in the faraway future. “You showed your weird shameful, scantily clad brown part to the world…and people are smiling at you as though they don’t find you disgusting.”

Remembering the next few years of school, the narrator asks: “How did you become a monster to yourself in such a short space of time?” She finds that at some point, opaque in its origins, she came to feel embarrassed of her body and her desires, to feel differently about “admiration and the menace of its absence.”

Over the course of the next 200-or-so pages, we see the narrator, never named, return to this question of performance and selfhood, of genuine obsession and the shame that accompanies it. We meet her again in Frankfurt, where, after studying comparative literature in university and spending amorphous amounts of time in Japan and London, she works as a video game translator (although she has no interest in video games). She moved to Germany in search of reinvention but finds that in this new city, surrounded by banal unfamiliarity, she only feels more adrift and unsatisfied. Self-actualization is buried under the drone of corporate small talk and repetitive morning commutes.

But it is on one of these very commutes that she comes unstuck. A brief interaction with a kind-eyed stranger, nicknamed “the Umbrella Man” because he returns her umbrella, brings on an all-consuming crush that will usher forth her metamorphosis—although, as most all-consuming crushes go, this sea change has very little to do with him. She hides herself inside the fantasy of this feverish one-sided romance, daring only to approach the Umbrella Man at the end of the novel, as a way to shield herself from knowledge that she is also, in fact, hiding from herself. As she narrates her year-long crush in almost painstaking detail, the blurry boundaries of her identity begin to come into focus. It is through the excavation of her sincere existential confusion that she emerges self-actualized. What Am I, A Deer? becomes a story of unwinding yourself from the temptation to shy away from the terrifying nakedness of being perceived—a story about the rejection of irony.

Reading the book, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he makes the case for a new literary movement. In it, he argues that while great postmodern figures like Thomas Pynchon and William Gass had wielded irony, parody, and cynicism to elucidate the flaws of 20th-century America, their penchant for ridicule had become confining rather than liberating. Irony, though entertaining, served an “exclusively negative function.” Its inherent critical and destructive qualities had made it the perfect tool to chip away at the country’s traditionalist, self-righteous veneer, but it was “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”

It was time, Wallace argued, for writers to dispense with haughty, self-conscious affectlessness and instead embrace a “New Sincerity”:

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’... who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values… Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction… The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘How banal.’”

Wallace’s movement never fully took hold, but it points to the cyclicality of culture. Irony and cynicism have come to define much of our own cultural moment, which I would argue began with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. At that juncture, what once were considered fringe beliefs became the dominant mode of political discourse, shattering the illusion of Obama-era optimism and awakening the masses to the innate inequality of the grand uniting narratives of the status quo (patriotism, nationalism, trust in your neighbor). Writing in NEW MODELS in 2019, cultural critic Joshua Citarella positioned young people’s existential irony as the product of the failure of neoliberal capitalism—high cost of living, low employment, government’s failure to defend its populace from facism and climate change—as well as the fracturing of Internet realities. “These material conditions,” he writes, “make Gen Z acutely aware that they are living at the end of an era; that they were born on the other side of the so-called ‘end of history.’”

Enter 2020, which saw the onset of COVID and the George Floyd protests. Irony had been at the forefront of popular culture for years leading up to this point, but social isolation and calls to reckon with the country’s inherent systemic inequalities made it even more appealing. Just as the post-modernists had done in the late 20th century, artists used irony to communicate their disillusionment with authority and mainstream media. Amid this anxiety-addled landscape, the Internet—and the young people whose worlds were built on it—found solace in a range of escapist, absurdist media, in the seemingly endless flow of Netflix true-crime documentaries, in the humor of heavily distorted deep-fried and dadaist memes, and in the maximalist genre of hyperpop. There was a certain pretension and hollowness to this art, but it was, as Jason Farago argues in his 2023 New York Times piece, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill,” a necessary coping mechanism in an age of “digital disorientation.” Irony was doing what irony does best: offering both an anti-mainstream forum to reckon with the unreality of our times and a protective detachment from feeling. Cynicism, and its aforementioned penchant for ridicule, became necessary insulation, particularly in Gen Z circles, from the grim reality of hopelessness. To defend ourselves from the all-but-guaranteed disappointment of contemporary life, we opted instead for a pessimism that cast sincerity, and engagement, as cringe. Citarella writes: “Ultimately, it was okay that a project failed because irony allowed us to maintain the plausible deniability that we ‘never really liked it to begin with.’ Why resist, if alternatives are impossible?”

Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is perhaps the most poignant literary manifestation of this late 2010s/early 2020s ennui. In a pre-9/11 New York, an unnamed narrator—a blond, privileged, beautiful young woman—concocts a pharmaceutical cocktail in order to put herself in a self-induced slumber for a year following the deaths of her parents, believing that hibernation, a total removal from the world, will grant transformation. Emptiness, for the narrator, is an act of survival. She’s biding time until she decides she wants to be alive again, and when she does emerge transformed at the end of the novel, the reader is left wondering if it will stick. “On the final page,” Jia Tolentino writes in her New Yorker review of the novel, “she recounts a deeply insane epiphany that suggests that she has learned, for the time being, to speak the language of people who feel lucky to be alive.”

The idea of a palliative hiatus from life finds a counterpoint in What Am I, A Deer? in the form of the Umbrella Man, who, as Emma Loffhagen writes in her review of the novel for The Guardian, functions as “a simulacrum of meaning that spares [the protagonist] the harder task of living.” The difference between these two depictions of escapism lies in the cultural attitude lingering below the surface: Moshfegh offers ironic commiseration but no solution to this existential crisis, while Barton suggests that the rejection of irony and the return of sincerity is the key to survival in the modern world. If the irony of the late 2010s and early 2020s elucidated the essential differences in our fragmented realities as means to grapple with hopelessness, sincerity attempts to reunite them through the earnest examination of universal human emotions.

This evidence alone is not enough to support a broad conclusion about a cultural shift from irony to sincerity—looksmaxxing is proof enough that irony still has legs in popular culture—but it makes me wonder if the allure of detachment is beginning to wane. A 2023 Rolling Stone article claimed that young people were shifting away from ironic content in favor of “cringe content” on platforms like TikTok, concluding that “the deep nihilism that defined the internet from 2018 to 2022 has been replaced with outright optimism.” More recently, I came across a popular video and Substack essay titled “Music’s Sincerity Arc,” which discusses Internet music’s burgeoning emphasis on connection. While hyperpop was before interested in ironic detachment, recent albums like Underscores’ U and Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer give voice to unadulterated yearning and emotion, evidence of the essay’s claim that “today’s cultural attitudes are distinguishable by their strong desire to sincerely and earnestly connect, marked by a sense of optimism and hope.”

That author also references Ethel Cain’s now-deleted 2024 Tumblr rant in which the singer wrote: “I just feel as though there’s a lack of sincerity in the world these days…I miss genuine passion…There is surely a noticeable lack of passion in everything these days. Everyone can feel it, everyone is talking about it. Everything now is ‘cringe,’ or ‘doing too much’, or ‘not that serious’. Actually, it is that serious.” Sounds a little like Wallace…

Irony, with its entertaining ridicule and enigmatic detachment, is enticing—and in some instances, truly necessary. But it can get lonely. Sincerity requires the courage to say what you really mean and the boldness to hope others feel that way too. Perhaps on the cusp of this new “New Sincerity,” we will learn to resist irony’s call and risk the shame of being ourselves.