I wish I had the words to put this simply

On Honor Levy's "My First Book"

It’s very easy to dismiss Honor Levy. But the Internet makes a lot of things easy. It’s easy to mainline porn to the point that it becomes a sort of political identity. It’s easy to order takeout slop and then tell strangers they’re being ableist when they imply you’re lazy. It’s easy to get in a fight with a person, probably a teenager, who lives in New Mexico and makes memes of Boston Celtics players’ faces on Maoist propaganda posters. The fact that the Internet makes something easy does not, in and of itself, make that thing particularly healthy or productive for you.

I picked up Honor Levy’s My First Book in response to two particularly ignoble impulses: I wanted to be of the moment, and I specifically wanted to see if I could join that moment’s pile-on against the buzzy literary it-girl of the week. I knew even before indulging these instincts that they were unbecoming justifications for spending $30 and a few hours of my life. One could plausibly argue that the five-second surge of emotion I experienced when buying My First Book, a “collection” of “short stories” from the one of the new Internet’s foremost schizoposters, was a full realization of Levy’s artistic vision: I did something because of the Internet, felt bad about it, and then experienced a brief movement toward sincerity. This argument wouldn’t be correct, but you could make it, toy with its possibilities, abandon it for its opposite, couch it in irony before soaking it in sincerity, and then abandon it abruptly. If you then repeated that action enough times, with enough ideas, proclamations, and sentiments, you’d have something like My First Book.

Courtesy of Penguin Press

Levy is hailed, however tentatively, as the voice of the Zoomers. It’s a distinction that was probably instrumental in convincing a bunch of established publishing executives to take a risk on a book in which characters fantasize about being “Dachau liberation day-skinny for spring break on Little Saint James.” It’s also one that most effectively situates her position as the object of collective millennial loathing. Surely, as others have argued, there is a component of the anti-Levy sentiment informed by something like jealousy. The millennials who read Levy, or more often read about Levy on the Internet (and it is almost exclusively people on the Internet who read, or read about, Levy), disproportionately belong to the media-adjacent class. As I’ve written about before, many likely feel they have been passed over within a precarious media environment; it’s not absurd to imagine their feeling a pang of jealousy upon seeing an alt-lit darling with carte blanche to publish, apparently, every short story she’s ever written with a Big Five publishing house. It’s just as absurd, however, to suggest that any criticism of Levy is structured by pure envy. A more plausible explanation for the millennial cohort’s out-of-hand dismissal is a perception, shaped along generational lines, that Levy is either inherently unserious, an augur of collapsing culture, or simply a bad person. Less prevalent than generational jealousy, then, is generational resentment. Zoomers remind millennials of a youth they feel was stolen from them, be it through the financial collapse, COVID lockdowns, or attempting to usher in American socialism through Democratic primaries. This resentment can manifest itself in unbecoming ways: it was not that long ago that ink in most major publications was spilled speculating as to whether a bunch of Ketamine-addicted young adults in a certain New York City neighborhood were fascists.

Insofar as Levy has attained, well, both generational and locational micro-celebrity, it’s neither surprising nor some profound event that snippets (or, rather, a snippet from the first page) of her book were mocked with a commitment and intensity that suggest more than just a distaste for meme-heavy writing. I partook in this mockery, and I don’t particularly regret it. But the conversation around Levy’s writing began to resemble that surrounding another literary it-girl, Lauren Oyler, earlier this year. In both occasions, one paragraph made the rounds, becoming the hinge point of every brutal takedown, every dismissive tweet, every rejection of literary merit. The unfortunate aspect of each round of consensus mockery is that both paragraphs were, quite evidently, jokes, and that parsing whether they were effective or worth eviscerating required opening the books within which they were made.

The first thing you notice about My First Book is that its opening “Love Story” begins with a url to Levy’s website, where a password-protected page hosts a hyperlinked index to every meme and other bit of Internet esoterica Levy references. The next is that paragraph, you know the one, the one that starts “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b.” It’s all a bit much, in fairness. But My First Book’s gravest mistake is that it begins with “Love Story” at all, insofar as it is the collection’s strongest previously unpublished articulation of Levy’s vision. From the opening paragraph, Levy’s voice reaches a vertiginous, Adderall-inflected hyper speed. “Love Story”’s prose is referential to the point of pure abstraction, more a collage of memes and shitposts than a string of discernible sentences. It’s a gambit, so fully internalizing the language of the Internet that the references become, in effect, utterly divorced from their referents, such that the signifier swallows the signified whole. Sure, you can roll your eyes at it, but “Love Story” is Levy at her best: in a sketch interrogating the cages of identity into which the Internet imprisons young people, her prose makes her point for her. It’s also, importantly, quite funny.

My First Book begins to unravel when this same prose falters—or, worse yet, becomes tired. It’s in this sense that Levy is both buoyed and cursed by her being anointed as the voice of a generation. Voices are made for saying things; Levy is either bad at saying them or has nothing to say. Take it from her narrator in one of the collection’s numerous undercooked stories, “Do It Coward:”

It’z just crazy how reality isz totally unreal!

I’m emo af about all these lost futures. Might just cut myself with Occam’s razor. I wish I had the words to put this simply.

Remember #CuttingForBieber? That really happened for real, no cap. That really happened, and so did a lot of other crazy stuff. Like freshman year and The Great Flood. #CuttingForBieber. That’s devotion. That’s what it is. We have a lot to learn from tween idolatry. Which is heretical, but not as cringe as you remember.

Far too often, My First Book slips into this sort of mealy-mouthed, imprecise gibberish. By the most generous reading, these lapses are the unintentional byproduct of a young writer encouraged to publish, by her telling, every story she’s ever written. The more concerning possibility is that they are intentional structural and formulaic decisions. Far too often, Levy’s prose is scatterbrained, herky-jerky, unmoored and unfocused; one gets the sense that this is a conscious defense mechanism guarding against the possibility of having to say anything at all. In other words, Levy’s is an advanced case of irony poisoning.

To be clear: literary culture does not need a sincerity revival. Enough of the 90s have returned; people wear big pants now. Ironists can, and do, reach great heights. The problem with Levy’s irony is that it undercuts her real strengths, however rarely they manifest themselves in My First Book. At her best, her meme-soaked linguistic momentum builds to a conclusion point that can almost feel like a humanistic revelation. Far too often, though, Levy betrays her sensibilities as a clout-chasing adult Catholic convert, cheaply performing rather than struggling for grace and deliverance. You can only watch a writer dance around, then run terrified from, something like sentiment before feeling like you’ve wasted your time, brain cells, and eyesight.

Reading My First Book, then, ends up feeling more like scrolling your phone than it does reading about the experience of scrolling your phone. Perhaps this was Levy’s intention: a book so authentically rooted in the Internet-mediated world that experiencing it feels like experiencing the Internet. But just as her irony-addiction undercuts her frequent feints toward sincerity, her constant attempts to articulate something like meaning problematize the notion that My First Book is all one big, performative put-on. It’s safer to pretend you’re an edgelord, but the fact that it takes Levy 160 pages before she employs her book’s first and only R-word suggests that her ambitions are sincerely literary. And they should be. You don’t write a book about life mediated through screens unless you feel that the experience of this mediation possesses a literary quality. I, certainly, believe it does, and at moments throughout My First Book, Levy appears as poised as anybody to elicit this quality. But having something to say about life with the Internet necessarily requires having something to say about life in the first place; Levy’s frequent missteps suggest that she may lack this prerequisite. Perhaps she, like her prose at its best, has been hollowed out by a lifetime of online semiotics; perhaps she is destined to be the Internet’s shaman rather than its interpreter or storyteller.