I had this idea earlier this summer that I was going to do a “buzzy books” capsule review thing—you know, consisting of things not only published this century but even this year. A little All Fours, a little Brat, and so on. The problem with this idea, however, was twofold: 1) I didn’t really want to buy these books since they were a bit pricey, being new, but 2) since they were buzzy, the wait times at the library were… unreasonable.1 So in the end only one book actually made it through the crazy wait time before summer was over: Honor Levy’s My First Book.2
Does everybody hate this book, by the way? I kind of got that impression, but now that I’m revisiting the reviews I can’t really tell.3 I see a lot of what I’m about to say, which is that the book is good in parts but also a big mess.4 Granted, the first paragraph of the first story is sort of designed to produce that effect (hatred, I mean):
He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiiii. It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his.
Do I hate this? I certainly hate them. But do I hate this paragraph? No, I don’t think so. Granted, you can tell just from the first sentence that this book will be unreadable in a year, but how it will be in thirty years is a harder call. At least to me.
My First Book is a precise and generally melancholy documentation of a particular online world.5 And in being such a document, it succeeds wildly. This book does really capture a particular kind of hyper-online mentality and frame of reference, and it does it with a kind of resignation—even if it’s bad to have inhaled so much extreme content, to have had your brain shaped by redpill memes and pro-anorexia message boards and videos of people getting beheaded, well, that’s just how it is for some of us.
Even for people like me, whose early Internet experience was pretty boring (I have never seen a video of somebody getting beheaded and don’t plan to start now), there are textures of experience Levy manages to capture that I don’t think I’ve seen anybody else quite pull off. Like this description (also in the first story) of texting somebody you have a crush on:
She was with her parents at Olive Garden. Stop that, they said, but she couldn’t. There was no stopping her. She was whispering to him through the crack in the wall. She was screaming for him across the canyon. She was calling to him from the balcony. She was texting him at the dinner table.
So—I enjoyed My First Book quite a bit for its ability to pull its voice off and the way Levy resists following traditional short story forms. I do not hate it. And I think that it is probably true that Levy has become a bit of a scapegoat for an annoying / notorious downtown New York scene.6 But she probably also is only as buzzy she is because of her adjacency to that scene, so, fair enough… live by the media hype machine, be thinkpieced by the media hype machine, and so on.
But.… I also don’t think the stories in it really work that well as stories. What they remind me of—mostly—are Netflix comedy specials. That is, they are mostly first person monologues delivered through an exaggerated persona that we know is not the comedian, but also not not the comedian, and they inhabit a kind of place where they aren’t fiction but they aren’t non-fiction either. And the reason I say Netflix comedy specials is because while Levy is resigned, she is also, frequently, preachy—as those specials often seem to be.
Take this passage in “Z is for Zoomer”:
Do the trolls even know what they’re doing or are they as lost as everyone else? Everyone is lost except for the bots. I don’t know if I believe in horseshoe theory, but I do know that I believe in that tiny, but infinitely deep, space between irony and sincerity. Ironic voting is still voting and ironic hate is still hate. Within that deep, dark, tiny space is a huge void, where separate realities drift past each other like children’s bubbles. Cheerful nihilism thrives. Come to think of it, I’m lost in that space. We all are.
Can’t you hear somebody saying that on a stage in a genial voice as they make gestures toward the audience? Because I sure can and it’s very annoying.7 The issue here is not that these are not polished little tales of zoomer ennui but that they lack some quality that would let them really exist as stories, not just exercises or speeches. I think it’s a sense of touching the ground. I don’t mean “being offline” but like—having a ground that the story unfolds on, instead of feeling like something thrown together for a reading.
The two most successful stories are the first (“Love Story”) and the last (“Pillow Angels”); the first, because it does trace a love story between its two (unbearable) protagonists, even if I found the ending of the story a little bit pat. “Pillow Angels,” though, is a mess—but a way more interesting mess than the rest of the book. It starts with girls at a sleepover doing drugs, and you slowly become aware that it takes place in an absurd alternate present in which ISIS has blown up the moon and Disneyland is the subject of sarin gas attacks and the narrator is the reincarnation of one of the 9/11 hijackers (or at least believes herself to be):
My parents had sex on Space Mountain. Nine months later I would be the second-worst thing to happen on September 11, 2001. One second, I was a martyr, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then, there with a puff, I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress in Los Angeles. That’s a fun fact about me.
When I finished “Pillow Angels” I found myself thinking an interesting route for Levy to take would be writing stories in the vein of Kelly Link—twisted fairy tales, essentially. I don’t think she should try to develop stories that are more in the traditional realist vein—though I wouldn’t actually listen to me on this score, I don’t know anything—because I don’t think there’s anywhere for her to go.
But I think horror and the fantastic is a place where Levy’s hypertextual sensibility would work very well, and it would give her work a place to go beyond the vague feeling that animates this book: that everything matters but also nothing matters. So I guess that’s my review: kinda weird, should get weirder. But I’ll read her next book.
In retrospect, I guess I could have “asked” for “review copies” for “my Substack.”
Which I almost forgot to read before having to return it to the library again.
I don’t think I could find it but I definitely saw a Substack post once that described not only this book but really Honor Levy’s whole being in highly unflattering terms, sort of like she was the horrible life-sucking meteor being in “The Colour Out of Space” or something.
Otherwise known as a “curate’s egg.”
It is a little like Marie Calloway in that respect, though not really in terms of style.
That she doesn’t actually try to represent in here, really.
Or this one in “Internet Girl”:
1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. A like means I saw it and tapped it twice. A like means I made a choice. A like means I paid attention. Simone Weil says attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Simone Weil starved to death. It was either anorexia or tuberculosis or too much Schopenhauer or in solidarity with the victims of war. No one knows. Not even Google. It might not even matter. Starving is starving is starving and sometimes I starved. Through the immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity, I learned to look at photos of who I wanted to become, to stare at the empty spaces I wanted to have, to run to 7-Eleven and chug Diet Coke, to imagine maggots crawling through the birthday cake.
Sorry—really—I’m so sorry—but when I read this I just think of Nanette.