Younger writers tend to shape their prose like overheated content streams: psychotically fast and full of memes. Perhaps the most polarizing representative of this type is Honor Levy, a Californian writer associated with New York’s oft-maligned Dimes Square scene. Imagine Eve Babitz had become addicted to writing people on Club PenguinLevy gained popularity as a co-host of the podcast. Wet brain; she landed a fictional work in New Yorkers at the age of 21. Her trademark is aggressive behavior: she has made fun of wokeness, raised awareness of Catholicism among Generation Z and interviewed the alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin. The only thing she was missing was the actual work.
Now Levy has published My first booka collection of short stories designed to be as internet-like as possible, with ASCII art, emojis embedded in the text, and enough digital references to fill a virtual library of Alexandria. It is clear that she wanted to write a manifesto to express the fears, desires, and existential Vibes the Adderall generation.
But to anyone who has scoured Discord and TikTok, her snappy voice seems less like a dramatic breakthrough than a flashy style that, despite occasional glimmers, lacks real substance and feels mostly like a façade for ideas and narratives that are dated, haphazard, and frequently fizzle out. Some stories here jump awkwardly between threads, as if she got bored and clicked through to another tab. Others display an over-the-top sense of provocation. “We all want to be like the day Dachau was liberated—skinny for spring break on Little Saint James,” she writes in “Pillow Angels.” Her protagonists exude a frenetic emptiness, musing about why they’re more privileged than other people before throwing their hands up in the air in a kind of baffled nihilism.
My first book begins with “Love Story,” which is chock full of internet gibberish. A woman taking “thinspo” selfies from her anime-themed bedroom texts with a man in a Taxi driver/American Psycho phase. The result is seven pages of winking cliches about a conservative man and a cute woman whose romance nearly collapses after she sends nude photos with a “practiced innocence” that suggests she’s had many partners. “This is her Ophelia era,” Levy writes. “Swimming in the pond, wet Coachella flower crown, drowned dark fairy grungecore.” Levy’s stacked references make sentences dissolve into one another; paragraphs accelerate in ways that reflect the characters’ fevered angst. Impressive but tiring, the meme-attack ploy here ultimately has enough impact to 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 uses cultural references for the purpose of alliteration, structural repetition, or some other rhythmic device, which makes them seem arbitrary. “I tried listening to podcasts about MSG or AIDS while reading books about DMT or NYC,” she writes in “Shoebox World,” which traces a relationship falling apart under the weight of too many disagreements. “Our shoebox,” she continues a few pages later, “a space in between in the big, bad, unjust world, was supposed to be tit for tat, shit for shit, reparations and redistribution and revolutions in October and November and December.”
Most egregious is “Do It Coward,” in which the narrator decides that New York City’s Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center is the perfect place for a “hauntological analysis” because it’s the city’s last great entertainment venue. This, however, degenerates into meme spam. “I’m totally emotional about all this lost future,” she tells us. “Maybe I’m cutting myself with Occam’s razor. I wish I had the words to put this simply. Remember #CuttingForBieber? That really happened, no capital letters.” Later, she offers a nonsensical description of present-day New York: “The whole city is a haunted house and you’re the thing that’s haunting it. … You’re like Sonic the Hedgehog, running so fast you only know darkness. You huff and slurp and laugh so hard you puke, and then you puke so hard you laugh, and then you show up in fifth period and give a PowerPoint™ presentation on The Catcher in the Rye.”
Into this morass lie some compelling moments in which Levy finds the right balance between anarchy and insight. “Hall of Mirrors” offers a respite of genuine poignancy, about a narrator who, while working at a camp with underprivileged students, longs to be a child’s mother so she can care for it in the face of the world’s inexplicable injustices. The writing here shows what Levy can do when she applies her evocative descriptions and references (JUUL culture, “emotional support rodents”) to a sophisticated subject. She has a knack for creating eerie contrasts that feel emblematic of our times, like the 12-year-old who watches beheadings online every day before dinner in “Little Lock.”
The longest piece – and the one that may have contributed to My first book as a generational text – is Levy’s Gen Z dictionary, which spans 50 pages and explains how Zoomers understand the meaning of words like based And pillThere are stylish turns of phrase (“exitymologies” is a funny neologism), but they get lost in a flood of ramblings about virtue and the feeling of growing up. “To be young is to have a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved,” Levy intones solemnly. “To be young is about extremes, and Generation Z is that young and that extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures. All times are desperate. Desperation is part of being human. I desperately want to define and redefine myself, because that’s what it means to be young.” Rather than focusing on the emotions and linguistic oddities of her cohort, this “dictionary” preempts the comprehensive inquiry with a critic-evading disclaimer: “These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.”
The strangest thing about Levy’s approach is that it’s almost the opposite of how using the internet feels. In reality, algorithms and social media don’t hit us at hyperspeed, but are elements we live with: we rot in our beds while scrolling through TikTok, screens gradually weaken our ability to socialize in real life, and tech neck makes us hunch over. There’s a history of writers using kinetic prose to convey futurism—think of Kodwo Eshun’s inventive and hallucinatory treatise on techno music Brighter than the sun– but the technology now seems outdated and hackneyed because everything is already running at full speed and the brain has rotted, making the internet a symphony of schizoposting. Perhaps to express this late-stage internet, prose needs to force you to live with it – to show the slow process of a young brain being twisted or drawn into hours of dissociative rabbit hole walking. My first book captures the eerie tedium of the doom-scroll era, but fails to capture the essence of how creepy it feels.•
MY FIRST BOOKBY HONOR LEVY
Kieran Press-Reynolds writes about music and internet culture for pitchforkThe New York TimesAnd No bells.
