Books

It's unfortunately very realhttps://t.co/tDIW2GhFIC

— Roman 🦅 (@goodhorsemen) May 4, 2024

The NYTimes review of the latest Joyce Maynard / Lena Dunham / Lady Caroline Lamb ‘book’ is titled “Young, Cool, Coddled and Raised on the Internet” [gift link]:

… We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in “My First Book,” a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan. What does she sound like when she plugs in? Here is the start of “Love Story,” this collection’s opener.

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. 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. hiii.

… Levy maintains this tone, and this frazzled online love story, across nine pages. The cultural information piles up vertiginously. Reading Levy is what it must have felt like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s.

The bottom falls out of “Love Story,” or perhaps there was no floor to begin with. Online the young man is Pyramus, and the girl is Thisbe: “He’d burn a church for her.” He thinks, “I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver.” About her, we read, “Her thousand-yard stare said she’d been on the carousel, in the trenches, and under the apple tree.” In real life, she’s a teen with her parents in an Olive Garden. He’s in a Wal-Mart aisle. They are about to withdraw back into their carapaces. And so here we are, convincingly lost amid America’s memes and mirrors in 2024, among what Joyce in “Finnegans Wake” called “the unhappitents of the earth.”

Levy is a young Bennington graduate from California, who has published stories in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant. She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she was encouraged to publish “My First Book” too soon. The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones, a few of which I suspect were typed on a MacBook a long time ago.

In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity…

What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.” Her characters are desperate and unfulfilled. They jockey for dominance in unlighted territory…

If “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now” is what qualifies as ‘smart magazine essay‘ material, it’s no wonder so many publications are in financial trouble. But I’m sure we’ll have all too many more chances to judge, since the main strength of all such lady writers is prolificity, and there’s always a market *somewhere* for narcissistic confessions from a very select socioeconomic demographic.