FLAT EARTH

A young white woman flails her way toward a literary life.

“Nothing in the history of civilization has ever been believable. Not even for a second,” announces the narrator of this slim, sardonic novel. “None of this happened.” Levy’s brilliant debut does, technically, have a plot: The narrator, Avery, is a grad student trying to carve out a life for herself as a writer. Meanwhile, her close friend, Frances, is seeing her own career as a filmmaker skyrocket—not that Avery’s jealous. But the storyline, such as it is, is one of the least interesting aspects of a work that performs a piercing sendup of life as a 20-something woman straddling New York’s arts and literary circles while dating, working, yearning, and—again and again—making mistakes. “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable?” Avery wonders at one point. “Like galleries.” In Avery’s narrative voice, Levy has achieved a fantastic yet paradoxical triumph: It’s a voice that manages to carry intimations as acerbic as they are full of longing, as strident as they are vulnerable, and as tart as they are unguarded. Avery soon finds a writing job with a right-wing dating app called Patriarchy targeted at rich men and beautiful women—“but,” Avery adds, because of a tanking economy, is “prepared to settle for hyper-online incel-adjacent misogynists and young white women with low self-esteem.” With her own hyperarticulate, stimulant-driven style, Avery (and Levy behind her) runs into her own life, helter-skelter, as if it were a door she’d forgotten to open. You’ll want to keep reading just to see what she says next.

Levy’s utterly original sendup of contemporary life seems destined to become a cult classic.