It all started, as is often the case with literary millennials, with Sally Rooney.
In 2021, Danish literary critic Linea Maja Ernst reviewed Rooney's novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” Ernst called it a “clear and distinctive contemporary satire” in his review for Weekendavisen, a weekly that has long been a must-read status symbol for Denmark's cultural elite.
But he also found “beige” parts. Rooney's characters, who are from the same generation as Ernst, 37, had joyless sex, he wrote. Ernst criticized those scenes as “low-fat perversion.”
“I was being a smartass,” Ernst said, laughing at his dining room table in Copenhagen this spring. “Like: This isn't really sexy!”
Then he received a call. A Danish editor wanted to talk. If you didn't like Rooney's sex scenes, could you do better?
Ernst's first novel, which is titled “Waist Deep” in English and comes out Tuesday in the United States after a stampede across Europe, is her attempt to answer that question.
In a sense, it is a comedy of manners. Seven adult friends spend a summer vacation at a country house. They talk, talk and talk. They prepare extravagant lunches and discuss elaborate dinners. They swim, they sunbathe, they tease… and their flirtations and frustrations run deep.
It's also a riff on Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In that play, four beautiful people disappear into a forest on the outskirts of ancient Athens, where enchantment generates confusing associations and shape-shifting desires. Here, in the forests of modern Denmark, Ernst's characters also have space to think about what they want, who they want, and how they live.
That's the magic of summer, Ernst said: “What if the rules were suddenly flexible?”
In “Waist Deep,” which premiered in Denmark in 2024 and has been translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Ernst writes with equal parts reverence for old friendships and heavy satire as her millennial characters organize a vacation worthy of an enviable Instagram post.
The characters are professionals and artists, cis and trans, parents and childless: a representative sample of the modern Danish middle class. They are polite. They are beautiful. And they are all a little lost.
They also have a lot of sex (real, raw, and hot), at least some of which occurs within a relationship.
Polyamory may be the plot device, but boredom is the driving force. Go through all the relationships in the book as the characters wonder what they would really want (and how they would live) if they had the freedom or courage to choose.
That's why “Waist Deep” cuts so much deeper than its first impression as a smart summer read, and perhaps why it was translated into 10 languages and optioned for a film adaptation.
“Basically, it's just asking the question: 'Could love be freer?'” Ernst said. “What if we wanted to live differently in our private lives?” he added. “And is it possible?”
experiment in life
That has been the central tension in Ernst's life for years. She is polyamorous; his wife, Amanda Herskind Ernst, did not.
For the last decade, since the couple first matched on Tinder, that chasm seemed impossible to bridge. They started dating only each other. Herskind Ernst, 32, saw Ernst through the turmoil of work while being a single father to a son from a previous relationship; Ernst assisted Herskind Ernst in a career change from midwifery to a corporate job. They both said that they loved each other intensely and fully.
But they just love differently. Ernst said he developed crushes, sometimes almost romantic obsessions, and could fall in love with many people at once. Herskind Ernst said she was in love with only one person: Ernst.
Cracks soon began to appear.
“We were breaking up and then we couldn't stay away from each other,” Herskind Ernst said. “That is our biggest and only disagreement.”
They got back together, but years later, it still doesn't seem like they've “figured it all out,” Ernst said.
“Yes, because we didn’t,” Herskind Ernst interrupted, laughing. “We just did it.”
The two were relaxing in their apartment in the trendy Vesterbro neighborhood, limbs intertwined. Laughter filtered from the courtyard of his co-op housing building and floated past his bedroom door, where Ernst had taped a piece of tape with the phrase “It's About Longing.”
“Words to live by,” he said.
The luxury of being depressed
This kind of ennui resonates in much of what is called, in oversimplified terms, “millennial literature.”
Once, only aristocrats had the luxury of lazing around, gossiping and wondering how to live and why. Now, so many people have so much luxury that they live like little aristocrats, reading and moping for years of soft palm.
In Denmark, it goes even deeper. The generous child care subsidies, vacation subsidies, and labor protections of the Nordic social model provide most Danes with the kind of possibilities available only to the wealthy in the United States.
In “Waist Deep,” like other recent novels by Dolly Alderton, Lillian Fishman and Vincenzo Latronico, the adults are still growing up and obsessed with talking about it.
That might be why there's been such a backlash against millennial literature from some older readers: many of the characters are irritating and seem stuck in adolescence, wasting their privileged lives.
But that could also be why these books have been so successful in northern Europe, several critics said: because they speak squarely to a fortunate but lost age group.
“This book is a portrait of a generation,” Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen, a Danish literary critic, said of “Waist Deep.” His characters, he added, wrestle with the same questions that keep Ernst's readers awake and find the same meaninglessness in the same luxury.
“That's how everyone is in Denmark,” he said, “because our middle class is very rich.”
Erik Skyum-Nielsen, another Danish critic, described Ernst's book as “a collective coming-of-age novel,” noting a play on words in the book's Danish title that is not translated into English. In Danish it is “Kun til navlen”, which translates as “Only up to the navel”. Parents say it around lakes and pools: Stay in the shallow end.
“It's a warning,” Skyum-Nielsen said. “But it is also a temptation, it is an invitation.”
'A talking cure'
Many of Ernst's characters wonder if anyone else feels the same disconcerting uneasiness: Is this it? Others feel the opposite when their partners and friends try to keep their options open: This is it, and it's wonderful. Why isn't it enough for you?
There was a reason the book was so easy to write, Ernst said: “I feel like I've been debating it with my wife for 10 years.”
Ernst wrote the novel by hand, he said, filling out a notebook at a local library. In the evening, Herskind Ernst read the draft and offered suggestions.
The characters became their little finger puppets, letting the couple act out their own problems. Draft after draft, they found a way to get ahead. Suddenly, everything didn't seem so urgent, they said.
“It turned out to be a kind of talking cure,” Ernst said.
She and Herskind Ernst married in 2024, and that same year, Herskind Ernst gave birth to a daughter using donor sperm. Then, in March of this year, Ernst gave birth to a son from the same donor. Now they are a family of five.
They have just moved from Vesterbro to a bigger, more remote place. This summer, you won't be running into your neighborhood friends while shopping for the trendy “bolle med ost” cheese sandwiches that have replaced cardamom buns as Copenhagen's “it” snack.
But they will have room to grow. They don't know what that will be like, and like many of Ernst's characters, they plan to find their balance in the in-between and the unresolved.
