Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties, and the question that tends to crop up in them, explicitly or not, is: Well, whose twenties? Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic.

“Fck! I’m in My Twenties” (Chronicle), a new cri de coeur by Emma Koenig, is a diary of these fretful years trimmed to postcard size. Drawn from a blog of the same name (minus the asterisk), the book offers a catalogue of twenty-first-century anxieties expressed in the form of freehand illustrations, diagrams, and slogans—the protest affiches of a new, self-conscious generation. Not much is lost in the unorthodox narration. Koenig’s general complaints about life (“Is everyone else actually happier than me? Or are they just better at pretending?”) and love (“There should be some kind of loyalty rewards program for getting hurt over and over again”) and something in between (“WHY IS OUR RELATIONSHIP SO COMPLICATED*??????? WE AREN’T EVEN SLEEPING TOGETHER!”) may strike readers as sloshy commonplaces. But a charm arises from her nicely observed details. On one page, she addresses such online compulsions as checking “that I am typing your name into the search box and not making it my status.” On another, she confesses that her idea of adulthood includes “obnoxiously large wine glasses.” Readers who use Facebook or who grew up in the golden age of Riedel ware will recognize these stresses.

Others will find reports like Koenig’s clannish and occasionally inscrutable. The age is subject to a parallax effect; the twenties look different depending on how far you are from them. That difference in perspective—you want what you think older people have, and vice versa—is notably neurotic-making, and can surely be held responsible for many compromised careers, doomed marriages, and general life crises. A self-help subgenre couldn’t be far behind. In “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now” (Twelve), Meg Jay takes the specific complaints of twentysomething life and puts them to diagnostic use. Jay is a clinical psychologist, and her patients have helped orient her in the tribulations of the age. “Every day, I work with twentysomethings who feel horribly deceived by the idea that their twenties would be the best years of their lives,” she writes. “People imagine that to do therapy with twentysomethings is to listen to the adventures and misadventures of carefree people, and there is some of that. But behind closed doors, my clients have unsettling things to say.”

One unsettling thing Jay’s clients say is that their lives are not what they had hoped. Their grinding work in college has failed to produce a decent job. Their confidence is at its nadir. They are having too much hapless sex, or not enough, or maybe the wrong kind. And what if they never get married? In an earlier guide, “20 Something Manifesto: Quarter-Lifers Speak Out About Who They Are, What They Want, and How to Get It,” Christine Hassler refers to this feeling as the Expectation Hangover™.

In fact, Jay’s prescriptions amount to: Don’t slow down yet! In professional life, a few lost years or lousy, aimless jobs could come to haunt you: “Late bloomers will likely never close the gap between themselves and those who got started earlier.” The frontal lobe of the brain launches a phase of major rewiring from the teens into the twenties, raising the stakes of engaged and productive behavior: “We don’t become what we don’t hear and see and do every day. In neuroscience, this is known as ‘survival of the busiest.’ ” In other words, it’s good to be mulling knotty problems at your desk, bad to be doing lots of nothing on the beach. Jay’s treatment doesn’t quell the general anxieties of twentysomethings; it channels them.

That power-suit sensibility marches through more specialized manuals, too, such as Tina Seelig’s “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World” (HarperOne), a book intended, most of all, for twentysomethings in the shadow of Silicon Valley. Seelig is the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and her advice echoes Jay’s call for proactivity, with a higher tolerance for risk. Think big and creatively, she urges; question the rules; claim leadership positions; do not be afraid to quit in order to get ahead. “The entire venture capital industry essentially invests in failures,” she observes. She suggests that twentysomethings take this as a cue to brainstorm wildly, bailing on what doesn’t pan out.

That’s probably easiest if you’re working in a lavishly funded industry filled with restless, well-connected people looking for the newest zany venture: advice on working through the challenges of twentysomething life frequently tells us more about the adviser than about the age. Not everyone will share an appetite for failing big, though. The economy is poor; even a higher professional degree, the first refuge of the risk-averse, may not guarantee a job. And average college debt, adjusted for inflation, has tripled since the late nineteen-eighties. (It’s still growing.) In the face of these and other shifts, the voices of previous experience seem questionable. It is not clear that the grownups know what’s really going on.

“You’re eating it, but you’re not savoring it.” Facebook

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The fullest guide through this territory, as it happens, avoids pointedly prescriptive claims. In “Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?” (Hudson Street), Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig provide a densely researched report on the state of middle-class young people today, drawn from several data sources and filtered through a comparative lens. Robin Marantz Henig is a baby boomer and a veteran magazine journalist focussing on science. Samantha Henig, her daughter, is in her late twenties, with a twenty-first-century version of the same career. (She has worked as a Web editor and writer at several publications, including this one, and is now the online editor of the New York Times Magazine.) Together, trading the writing in tag-team fashion, they assess the key departments of twentysomething life—school, careers, dating, family-making, and so forth—and try to discern how much has actually changed. They are interested not so much in the Mark Zuckerbergs of the demographic as in the parental-basement dwellers; they believe that people in their twenties have been getting a bad rap and want to know whether concern is justified.