WE’RE REPEATEDLY TOLD THAT WE’RE LIVING THROUGH THE END-TIMES, crushed by conspiracy theories, crypto, Palantir, Nick Fuentes, Libs, gooning, and fascism. Every day unleashes a sparkling new hell, which makes for good headlines. Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel, Flat Earth, conjures up and satirizes this doomsday present through the POV of a young woman. She’s trying to become a normal functioning member of society and groping feebly for her destiny in the void, which here consists of a media studies master’s program and a downtown New York City that she briefly leaves for a road trip to speedrun across a broader America suffocated by MAGA fog. For Levy, the arty scenesters of Manhattan and the QAnon disciples of Texas worship the same false idols—they’re cults to fill the abyss left by the absence of organized religion. The book reduces these character types to their most recognizable, rotten traits. In interviews, Levy said she deliberately wrote the people as “two-dimensional,” and the protagonist a “nonentity”; the book itself is so zippy out of a desperation “to be liked,” Levy says, which came from a hyper-awareness that the reader could jilt Flat Earth for their smartphone at any second.
Levy cofounded Forever magazine, a buzzy New York publication with a clunky GeoCities-style website and an archive that includes alt-lit heroes like Tao Lin and also con artist Anna Delvey. Levy belongs to a milieu of young writers like her Forever cofounder Madeline Cash and Paradise Logic author Sophie Kemp, who mangle contemporary malaise and the sordid state of heterosexual courtship into pleasurably baffling narratives that often descend into delirium, like a woman who takes a freakish drug that promises to make her the greatest girlfriend of all time.
Flat Earth follows another young woman searching for meaning in a numbed-out algoworld. Avery is a wannabe writer who spends hours at night playing Candy Crush instead of reading the books on her nightstand. It’s an existentially meandering book in the lineage of How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, one of Levy’s teachers, with Sheila’s innocent curiosity supplanted by Avery’s cynical anhedonia. It aggressively plays into the millennial and up’s caricature of Gen Z as a kind of depressive wasteland. Men of all ages are holding out for the new class of juicy undergrads, no woman allows herself to age gracefully without a facelift, and everything is fucked politically and economically. It sketches an age whose spirit “is paranoia and distrust at everything,” where the gradual breakdown of society manifests as small cruelties and confusions suffered by its inhabitants.
If you take the book as a depiction of entropy, its plot details can be very funny, the caricatures locked on their targets. In the first act, Avery follows her richer, more self-assured (read: vain, exploitative) and tantalizingly skinny “best” “friend” Frances as she travels the country, harvesting flyover-state decay (incels, QAnoners, megachurches) for a “really American” documentary. While Frances becomes famous, Avery sugar-babies for a law professor who makes her hide in the bathroom at a restaurant when someone he knows walks in the door. She writes a short story about a magic lipstick withstanding fifty blowjobs that makes her literary mentor say she should stop writing about her personal life. Eventually, she gets a job at a right-wing dating app called Patriarchy, which then fires her because her values aren’t traditional enough. She ends the novel pretty much exactly as she begins, wandering without purpose and without cash.
All the while, a metafictional layer of “cultural reports”—short passages that appear before each section—unravels like corecore videos: a montage of sociopolitical flotsam. Avery is supposed to be writing them for her master’s program. A couple of sample lines from one read: “Women don’t want to go to work. When surveyed, all of us say we prefer to stay home and wash dishes. The front page of the paper reports: The Future Isn’t Female Anymore.” “Our touchscreens tell us that the American economy is perfect,” goes another. “Still, the currency is worthless, it spends like Monopoly money. The men say the girls put it all up their noses. The girls say the men spent it all at the racetrack.” These dispatches from a disjointed media-gobbler function a bit like second-screen slop—sometimes clever but often just like a compilation of detritus you’d hand a friend to update them about The State of Things after a five-year coma. “The men say the American air is estrogenic.” “Race science becomes a topic of conversation at parties.” “The men are playing with unstable digital currencies.”
The way Avery and Frances get casually abused by men and by each other, and then offer a detached shrug in response, is what inflames you as a reader and powers the narrative—but it’s a limited power. In a structural sense, the marathon of moroseness drives the book forward, filling up the pages with details that underscore how damaged and self-deluded Avery is because of parental neglect, the patriarchy, and other social circumstances. But the reader’s horrified reaction never lines up with Avery’s been-there-done-that jadedness, which works like a wet blanket to smother its own inflaming quality. Her learned vanity and refusal to change starts to feel pathetic. She’s a grad student who dreams of being a famous writer and lives in the magical hellscape of New York City, yet she somehow can’t nudge herself out of a banal fate of “syphilitic-looking unvaccinated conspiracy theory” men. Her brain moves incredibly fast as she analyzes social situations and the way individuals “perform” a studied appreciation of art, but she lacks an iota of willpower to further her writing career.
Levy sketches scenes in taut, fragged-out prose, as compact as the book itself and the “rail-thin girls” that populate Avery’s vision. Avery describes sex with men with a clinician’s eye: she strokes to produce “ejaculate.” She never looks pretty, or any other colloquial adjective; she’s “fit for public consumption,” the kind of phrasing the Department of Sanitation would use to describe safe food or potable tap water. Occasionally, Avery explodes out of her analytic headspace, like when she gets blasted and tries to seduce a fashionable sculptor.
The dissociative neurosis of Levy’s writing is a hallmark of much modern alt-lit, but Avery’s fatalism gets exhausting, like an emotion-sucking vampire that makes you see the world in a grayer hue than it is. Avery’s constantly bleeding on men, mattresses, her shattered smartphone screen. She’s the victim of “pernicious environmental” toxins and iPhone radiation, berated and misunderstood by her mother, her best friend, the many men she relies on for money. She’s sick to her stomach, she’s cold, she loses her ID, she gets evicted, she looks like a “drowned rat” with hives. She sits underneath “an industrial heating vent” that makes her eyes watery; she’s having a “small, insignificant stroke.” At a rave, she gets concussed. When she goes to a gallery, it’s “unseasonably cold” outside and “overheated” inside, and “no one had anywhere to put their coats.”
She seems at the core to be a masochist who takes pleasure in taking the least pleasure in every context. Sometimes Levy lets you see the vulnerability under the surface: the fact that she acts so judgmental and projects so much because of a fear of being seen as a poser, or someone who will amount to nothing, a shadow of Frances’s unfairly earned stature. Other times, the spectacle of deadness and desensitization cancels itself out, blocking the reader from caring about any of it. Avery sees a woman “watching an airplane explode on her seat-back television” and falls asleep watching InfoWars and “fantasizing about nuclear war, biological weapons, the grid going down.”
This may be intentional, but the stakes rarely feel charged. You need some high frequencies to make the low ones feel really abject, but Flat Earth’s stereo field is all one-note miserabilism. The book’s most consequential relationship—Avery’s conflicted feelings about her frenemy Frances—seems poised to erupt after Avery brutally betrays her friend. But it only registers as a “minor agitation.” This is probably meant to be a commentary on the shallowness of Frances’s life, the way she fetishizes rot to fill the abyss of her own privilege. Or perhaps she’s posturing cool indifference and secretly tormented inside, while also considering the act as pity-me grist for the memoir mill. Whatever the case, it’s ambiguous and underwritten, which is actually a fitting non-climax for a book composed of Avery’s false starts.
Flat Earth is, by its own terms, ambitious, trying to catalogue and capture the myriad ways we’re being rewired by and responding to the shit-post-modernity we’re living through. Levy deftly conveys how the desperate craving for subcultural coolness has corroded us, the difficulty of making a self in a time of ideological incoherence, and the way capital has infested and poisoned our personal relationships. Avery lacks an emotional range, but at least we’re given some context to understand why. She’s a human pancake flattened by circumstance and an unwillingness to fix herself.
The problem is that satirizing a time that already feels like satire doesn’t feel particularly novel or . . . entertaining? Some jokes aren’t far from the meta-ironic quip style often found on Twitter, the way people sardonically dunk on Dimes Square. The register feels a bit obvious—when Avery sees a cluster of protesters being kettled outside a convention for oilmen and gas station connoisseurs, what she’s most struck by is how the “girls looked good in their summer dresses, zip ties fastened around their tiny wrists.” The men are treated like toy soldiers, but in real life, even the boys with Zynned-out Barstool brains and the looksmaxxer clowns who live and die by crypto clout have intricate motivations and a mottled belief system. Levy is locked in on the micro-typologies of personality and the macro-structure of the moment, but she doesn’t really take us anywhere new or offer a definitive stance on or disruption of this vortex of dread. This might just be a reflection of Levy’s limitations, not as an “empath” but as someone who wrote a book in her twenties, rapidly imbibing a cultural moment and feeling trapped inside it. Flat Earth reflects the most blackpilled elements of our age and stylishly wallows in them.
Kieran Press-Reynolds is a writer living in New York.