Not My First Review: On Honor Levy’s “My First Book”
Honor Levy | My First Book | Penguin Press | May 2024 | 210 Pages
“Giving,” “serving,” “fall of Rome era,” “waifu,” “thinspo,” “femcel,” “Laincore.” This is the language of Honor Levy’s world. Like a trend piece in The Cut, it’s stuffed full of the sorts of words I’m embarrassed to admit that I understand. (Laincore, at least, required a Google search, and all I could find online was a Reddit thread that left me with more questions than answers.) Regardless of its literary merit, Honor Levy’s debut story collection My First Book might be remembered centuries from now as the first to print the word “looksmaxxing.” And, for a writer being called “the voice of Generation Z,” that’s not nothing.
The opening story in My First Book, “Love Story,” is all voice and momentum: a darkly funny montage of an internet-native relationship that’s doomed from its start by characters who see themselves as little more than the sum of their material signifiers. The girl has a bedroom full of white Monster cans and “barcode wrists.” The boy, “in his /a/ poster era,” hedges his “I love you” texts with “lmao.” The relationship inevitably crumbles, but Levy’s narration is distant enough to afford both characters the compassion that they deny themselves. “Love Story” reads like Elif Batuman reflected through a funhouse mirror—two kids too smart for their own good, minds warped by Adderall and Instagram, hung up on the particulars of a world so self-referential that it’s stopped making any sense at all.
Most of the stories in My First Book are like this: Light on plot and internal narratives. Instead, what we get from Levy’s characters is voice and energy. Far from the “novel in tweets” that critics warned us about, we’ve instead arrived at the primacy of the disembodied voice as a character in of itself, jostling in the void to be the loudest of them all.
At first glance, most of Levy’s characters fit a type: Unnamed “I”s and “we”s and “she”s bounce between New York City house parties, college years spent upstate, and childhoods grown in California. The girls spend too much time with rich boys that they know are bad but can’t resist anyway. The disembodied voice in the story “Do It Coward” is “staring at the fourth wall, mind melting, no-clipping, glitching, laughing,” while the narrator of “Little Lock” remembers a crush she had “on a boy named Charlie with dirty fingernails and perfect pop star hair,” writing his name over and over in her diary in “fifth-grade looping cursive.” Even the exceptions to that rule replay similar beats. “Fig” is an abortion story from the boyfriend’s perspective—“Are you feeling okay? Does it hurt? Should I Postmate anything?”—who says that they should hurry up and get the procedure done ASAP because “mother needs me in Jackson Hole.”
In what I’ve come to understand as signifiers of “cool” for a certain literary set, Levy’s characters flirt with rediscovering Catholicism and rejecting identity politics. (“Men explain things to me and that’s why I love them,” says the narrator of “Do It Coward.”) The story “written by a sad girl in the third person” opens with a mock trigger warning, alluding to “mentions of cigarettes, capitalism, death, swearing, [and] cringe.”
Yet, as her stories progress, Levy makes a point to peel back a little bit of the superficial edginess to reveal some of her characters’ human core. In “Do It Coward,” what begins as a portrait of a young writer feeling constricted by the cultural narratives thrust upon her—“she is the only child of Gen X coastal elite hipster atheists who own their own home, lease their car, and hate it all”—slowly morphs into a much more interesting meditation on memory and purpose. Levy’s characters struggle to see themselves as anything other than the product of subcultures (digital or otherwise), and as readers, we understand that as a deflection from the loneliness they feel but can’t articulate. In this world, edgy politics, daydreams about being “Dachau liberation day-skinny,” and nights spent with coked-up trust fund heirs are just manifestations of their (not) uniquely Gen Z angsts. Yet while the distance afforded by fiction lets readers get a wider, if not quite panoramic, look at these characters beyond the narrow scope of their neuroses, it’s clear that Levy doesn’t see the narrative tricks of writing a solution, either. Like one of her narrator’s quips: “most books don’t get a second printing.”
Reading Levy’s stories in sequence—as a cross-section of a certain type of over-educated, over-medicated Zoomer consciousness—you get a sense of the amorphous-yet-ever-present insecurity buried behind the slang and the irony. Especially when she writes men. An ungenerous reader of My First Book might claim that many of Levy’s female characters feel like little more than the sum of their tropes—ADHD, anorexia, happy childhoods, yet still for some reason sad. The boys, meanwhile, are approached with an authorial distance that lets them be both shittier and more interesting.
In “Good Boys,” which was published in the New Yorker in 2021 and generated much of Levy’s initial buzz, a group of bicontinental twenty-something boys brag about their time in Europe to two girls they’ve coerced onto their rooftop terrace. “In Greece, the cigarettes are cheap,” the narrator remembers the boys repeating, as if the entirety of their experience could be described in the joys of untaxed nicotine. “[The boys] filled an entire suitcase with little yellow boxes of George Karelias and Sons. They say we can smoke as many as we want. They’re proud.” The narrator contrasts the boys—creative and destructive yet intoxicating all the same—with the other girls, not invited to the rooftop, who they write off not as bitches but as dogs. “Dogs,” the narrator explains, “are girls who care.” In Levy’s stories, the “anti-woke,” misogyny that the girls try on for size is simply a fact of the boys’ lives. And yet for the boys, that privilege isn’t condemned. Levy’s female characters watch the boys’ freedom with something like envy. Is that ingrained misogyny a trick of fiction, another lens through which we can get a sense of the characters’ twenty-first-century angst? Or is it a blind spot of a writer too immersed in the same world her characters are, grappling with the same issues in real time?
Similarly, “Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy” recounts the downward spiral of a male model in Los Angeles, tracking his descent from “in a photo on the preloaded album on the iPhones in the Apple Store” to struggling to find work, waking up “on the couch in [a] trap house… drunk as fuck and maxing out his credit cards.” What follows is, like “Love Story,” a flash-fiction montage of a character so lost his only sense of himself is his tastes—"he likes listening to electronica, driving sports cars, beautiful women, organic food, organic wine, and the sunset…. [photos of the sun] are the only pictures on his phone.” And yet in this beautiful boy’s manic leaps from lifestyle to lifestyle, ideology to ideology (“the best decision he made all year is taking the blue pill. It feels great to have the same politics as attractive women”), we can sense hints of an aimless romantic trying and failing to find meaning as the world speeds past him.
If Levy’s conceptualization of girlhood is being bogged down by history and expectations—the pressures to be skinny, to be educated, to be like or unlike your family—boyhood is the opposite: total freedom from any responsibility except to yourself. It’s having the option to take and to exploit and to not have to explain your behavior. And yet, like the girls, these characters are facing the same creeping sense of alienation; of being stuck in a world where cultural touchstones are hyper-specific, so enveloped in layers and layers of irony that even the most tangible markers of identity (see the many male character’s obsessions with “they/thems”) have become fuzzy. And it may just be the grace of third-person voice, but it seems like Levy’s “beautiful boys,” flaws and all, are most equipped to handle the insanity of the twenty-first-century world—or at the very least more willing to take what they feel they deserve.
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While working on the manuscript that would become My First Book, Levy was mentored by Giancarlo DiTrapano, whose taste-making indie press Tyrant Books was initially supposed to publish it before DiTrapano’s death in 2021. In Levy’s telling, she was introduced to DiTrapano in college, after years of already being a fan of Tyrant Books’ unique “alt lit” list—including titles like Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe (which was edited by DiTrapano but ultimately published by Hachette’s Back Bay Books) and what purpose did I serve in your life by Marie Calloway. And while My First Book is in conversation with Conroe and Calloway’s internet antics, the Tyrant Books author who Levy seems to be drawing from most is Megan Boyle. Liveblog, the 2018 (re)publishing of a real blog Boyle kept for six months, is part autofiction, part performance art, and was one of the defining titles of the so-called “alt-lit” movement of the 2010s.
Liveblog crossed over into mainstream literary discourse, garnering reviews in magazines like The New Yorker and arguments on social media. In the best of these reviews, Lauren Oyler, writing in Bookforum, contrasts the “sad girl” novels of the 2010s—Ottessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Catherine Lacy’s The Answers—with Boyle’s refreshing eagerness and search for meaning. Oyler reads Boyle’s transcribed blog posts as “goofier [and] more straightforwardly charming” than the style of both her mainstream and alt-lit contemporaries. She describes how Boyle “uses the loose rules of internet grammar to careen from delirious to cynical to demoralized to possibly better than yesterday.” Liveblog chronicles Boyle struggling in real-time with drug use, depression, and the ups and downs of her tenuous writing life, but unlike the overdone style of those who came before her, Oyler points out Boyle’s prose isn’t “detached… so much as unmoored.”
Edgy subject matter aside, Levy’s fiction seems to be getting at the same “making sense of the insanity” ethos as Boyle’s Liveblog. Behind the drug- and internet-influenced vernacular, both seem cautiously optimistic about their characters. Yet Levy, unlike Boyle, is decidedly not journalistic. There are few sections of My First Book that one could qualify as Boyle- style confession. While Boyle is a maximalist, hoping that by including as many details as possible some greater insight will be gleaned, Levy’s sense of characterization through the contours of voice and scene is that of a fiction writer at heart.
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My first instinct upon approaching My First Book was to be harsh. Levy is an energetic and engaging prose writer, but beyond the book, it’s easy to feel cynical about her profile: twenty-six-year-old girl, follows her idol Brett Easton Ellis to Bennington College long after he’s left campus, published just enough in the right sorts of places to get recognition, hailed as “the voice of Gen Z” in press materials. Part of this, I know, is systemic: the mainstream publishing industry loves poaching indie talent, repackaging them as ready-made brands, and then tooting their own horn about the arrival of another generational talent.
Why is Levy—a talented writer, but by no means a prodigy—the one held up as the voice of her generation, with the chibi angel made of _s and –s and )s on her debut’s cover? Is it because she punctuates her sentences with emojis? Or because she writes about Omegle? Anyone who has spent any time in an undergraduate writing workshop in the past five years has seen plenty of that. As we enter the middle chunk of the 2020s, being young and cool can’t be Gen Z’s only schtick. Is Levy going to be thirty and still writing about nostalgia for a childhood spent on the uppercase-“I” internet? Is there a market for Gen Z writers doing anything else?
Levy’s prose is sharp and smart, but upon finishing her debut collection, it’s hard to shake the feeling that its content was created to fit Levy’s brand rather than the other way around. Along with Gabriel Smith’s Brat, another DiTrapano debut picked up by Penguin Press, a cynical critic might look at the Big Five publishers’ expansion into the alt-lit scene with a skeptical eye. Are they mining the unpublished list of a groundbreaking indie press because they see a cohort talented enough to be relevant thirty years from now? Or does the market research simply indicate that the Zoomers want their own books, and Levy was the coolest voice with a manuscript ready? Is the PR copy promising a “groundbreaking debut author” just obscuring the fact that she’s a flavor of the week?
If anything, My First Book is the sort of strong debut that, paradoxically, will almost certainly not be Levy’s best work. Flaws and all, it’s an undisputable arrival of a truly talented stylist, even if she does wear her influences plainly on her sleeve. Yet, aside from the occasional cutting, compulsively Tweetable turns of phrase, there aren’t any particular new ideas or voices here. It’s younger, it’s “cooler,” but My First Book is functionally the same internet-inflected, twenty-something angst we’ve been reading for two decades. Levy’s prose is alternatingly horrifying and hilarious, sometimes even offering an insightful peek into an endemic subculture on social media. Setting the book down, there’s a creeping sense that it will only be once Levy breaks out from her title as “the Zoomer girl” that she will truly find something to say.