The Unbearable Lightness

By and large, women’s coming-of-age ­narratives used to follow self-improving, redemptive arcs, but they have taken a darker turn in recent years. “I’ve come to believe one can take the sentimental temperature of a cultural moment by looking at its novels’ heroines,” wrote Stephanie Danler for the New York Times in 2019. And the tone of this latest breed of books is “a rebellion cut through with apathy.” In response to our hyper-digital, hyper-corporate, hyper-unjust reality, these protagonists have become “gloriously self-destructive” and “essentially alienated,” inching their way toward new and disturbing resolutions.

Two new novels are part of this rebellious turn: Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour and Marie-Sissi LaBrèche’s Borderline (published in French in 2000 and translated by Melissa Bull last year). Both chart the course of world-weary women in their...