As the oldest of us millennials begin to flee screaming from our 20s, it seems we may have forgotten something — where’s our “voice of a generation” novel? One of those all-important lifestyle accessories that supposedly speak to, and for, the sensibilities and circumstances of an entire American cohort? Not only is the current front-runner, Lena Dunham, not even a novelist, but her fictional avatar in “Girls” dismisses the idea of such a generational voice in the show’s very first episode.

Where are the successors to “This Side of Paradise,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “On the Road,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Generation X” and “Infinite Jest”? Time’s Lev Grossman blames our increasingly “multicultural, transcontinental, hyphenated identities and our globalized, displaced, deracinated lives” for why any consensus about a single voice now seems impossible. I’d go even further and argue that the “voice of a generation” novel never existed to begin with. For starters, why did we ever pretend novels by straight white guys about straight white guys spoke for entire generations?

Even if you think that’s politically correct claptrap, and that those works transcended the boundaries of identity and social context (which is a weird thing to claim about a social novel), the idea of a one-size-fits-all masterpiece runs squarely against the novel form. Novels can certainly cover plenty of ground, containing hundreds of characters in diverse settings, but they’re still all about specificity. To a novelist, the lowest common denominator of affectations, fashions and consumption patterns evoked by the generational tag are seldom any character’s most interesting qualities, except in novels that are about superficiality itself, like “American Psycho.”

The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality. You might get some vague notion of me if I told you I’m a first-generation Thai-American, middle-class, atheist, single, childless, postgraduate, freelancing, New Englander, straight, male millennial. But it’s probably more telling to say that I once took a first date home to watch zit-popping videos on YouTube, or that I accidentally interrupted my college graduation ceremony with a screaming toy monkey I’d forgotten I’d been carrying all day (“Sorry, my monkey went off,” I explained). The experience of identity — whether it’s race, religion, nationality, gender or generational membership — is certainly necessary for a full portrait of a person, but never sufficient. There’s also memory, thought, feeling, perception, neurochemistry, mood and everything else.