There’s a tendency among younger writers to style their prose like overheated content streams: psychotically fast and thronged with memes. Perhaps the most polarizing practitioner of this is Honor Levy, a California writer associated with New York’s oft-reviled Dimes Square scene. Imagine Eve Babitz if she grew up addicted to trolling people on Club Penguin. Levy gained traction cohosting the podcast Wet Brain; she landed a piece of fiction in the New Yorker at age 21. Edgy bait is her trademark: she has mocked wokeness, evangelized Catholicism to Gen Z, and interviewed alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin. The only thing missing was actual work.
Now, Levy has published My First Book, a collection of short fiction, which has been framed to be as internet-y as possible, with ASCII art, emojis embedded in the text, and enough digital references to fill a virtual Library of Alexandria. It’s clear she meant to write a manifesto, to tap into the anxieties, desires, and existential vibes of the Adderall generation.
But for anyone who’s trawled Discord and TikTok, her zippy voice comes across less as a dramatic breakthrough than as a flashy style that, despite occasional glimmers, lacks genuine substance and feels mostly like a façade for ideas and narratives that are dated and haphazard and frequently spin out. Some stories here bounce clumsily between threads as if she’s gotten bored and clicked through to another tab. Others display a try-too-hard flair for provocation. “We all want to be Dachau liberation day–skinny for spring break on Little Saint James,” she writes in “Pillow Angels.” There’s a frenetic emptiness to her protagonists, who worry about why they’re more privileged than other people before throwing up their hands in a kind of baffled nihilism.
My First Book opens with “Love Story,” which comes jammed with gibberish cyber neologisms. A woman who posts “thinspo” selfies from her anime-themed bedroom texts with a man in a Taxi Driver/American Psycho phase. The result is seven pages of winky tropes about a conservative-lite man and a twee woman, whose romance almost collapses after she sends nudes with a “practiced innocence” that suggests she’s had a lot of partners. “This is her Ophelia era,” Levy writes. “Floating in the pond, wet Coachella flower crown, drowned dark fairy grungecore.” Levy’s stacked references make sentences dissolve into one another; paragraphs accelerate in a way that mirrors the characters’ feverish anxiety. Impressive yet fatiguing, the meme-onslaught gimmick ultimately has enough payoff here to make it work. The problem is that Levy recycles it for nearly every story in the book.
Many of them are long exercises in meme recall, as if she were competing in an Olympic shitposting final. Often, Levy deploys cultural references for the purpose of alliteration, structural repetition, or some other rhythmic method, which has the effect of making them feel arbitrary. “I’ve tried listening to podcasts on MSG or AIDS while reading books about DMT or NYC,” she writes in “Shoebox World,” which traces a relationship that falls apart under the weight of too many discrepancies. “Our shoebox,” she continues a few pages later, “an interstice in the big bad unjust world, was supposed to be tit for tat, fuck up for fuck up, reparation and redistribution and revolutions in October and November and December.”
Most egregious is “Do It Coward,” in which the narrator decides that New York’s Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center is a perfect spot for “hauntological analysis” because it’s the city’s last great amusement site. This, however, devolves into meme-spam. “I’m emo af about all these lost futures,” she tells us. “Might 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.” Later, she offers a nonsensical description of contemporary New York: “The whole city is a haunted house and you’re the thing haunting it.… You are like Sonic the Hedgehog, running so fast you know only darkness. Puffing and sipping and laughing so hard you puke and then puking so hard you laugh, and then showing up to fifth period and giving a PowerPoint™ presentation on The Catcher in the Rye.”
Lost in the morass are some riveting moments where Levy lands on the right balance between anarchy and insight. “Hall of Mirrors” offers a reprieve of genuine poignancy, involving a narrator who, while working at a camp with underprivileged students, yearns to be one child’s mother so she can care for him in the face of the inexplicable injustices of the world. The writing here shows what Levy can do when she applies her evocative descriptions and references (JUUL culture, “emotional support rodents”) to a fleshed-out theme. She has a knack for eerie contrasts that feel emblematic of our era, as in the 12-year-old who watches beheadings online every day before dinner in “Little Lock.”
The longest piece—and the one that might have helped cement My First Book as a generational text—is Levy’s Gen Z dictionary, which sprawls across 50 pages, explaining how Zoomers have shifted the meanings of words such as based and pill. There are stylish turns of phrase (“exitymologies” is one fun coinage), but they get lost in a deluge of fluff about virtue signaling and how it feels to come of age. “Being young is having a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved,” Levy intones solemnly. “Being young is about extremes and Gen Z is so young and so extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures. All times are desperate. Desperation is part of being human. I’m desperate to define myself and redefine myself because that is what it means to be young.” Instead of zeroing in on the emotions and linguistic curios of her cohort, this “dictionary” preempts the broad survey with a critic-evading disclaimer: “These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.”
What’s strangest about Levy’s approach is that it’s almost antithetical to how using the internet feels. In reality, algorithms and social media don’t hit us at hyperspeed but are elements we sit with: decaying in our beds while scrolling TikTok, screens gradually eroding our ability to socialize IRL, tech-neck making us stoop. There’s a history of writers deploying kinetic prose to convey futurism—just think of Kodwo Eshun’s inventive and hallucinatory techno-music treatise More Brilliant Than the Sun—but the technique feels dated and derivative now because everything is already speedmaxed and brain rotten, leaving the internet a symphony of schizoposting. Maybe for prose to express this late-stage internet, it must force you to live with it—to show the slow process of a young brain being twisted or pulled into hours of dissociative rabbit-holing. My First Book captures the uncanny ennui of the doom-scroll era but fails to get at the heart of how freaky it feels.•
Kieran Press-Reynolds has written about music and internet culture for Pitchfork, the New York Times, and No Bells.
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