Book Review: ‘My First Book,’ by Honor Levy

MY FIRST BOOK, by Honor Levy

“Thank God I won’t have to deal with the internet.” According to Bruce Jay Friedman, those were the last words his friend Mario Puzo ever said to him. We forget — or at least I do — how many writers from the last century made it into the age of email. Muriel Spark lived long enough to write a series of online diaries for Slate.

We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in “My First Book,” a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan. What does she sound like when she plugs in? Here is the start of “Love Story,” this collection’s opener.

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

It was Harold Ross’s policy, when he was editor of The New Yorker, never to run a poem he did not understand. I responded to the way these sentences crackled even before I looked up “haplogroups” and learned that they are genetic classifications.

Levy maintains this tone, and this frazzled online love story, across nine pages. The cultural information piles up vertiginously. Reading Levy is what it must have felt like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s.

The bottom falls out of “Love Story,” or perhaps there was no floor to begin with. Online the young man is Pyramus, and the girl is Thisbe: “He’d burn a church for her.” He thinks, “I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver.” About her, we read, “Her thousand-yard stare said she’d been on the carousel, in the trenches, and under the apple tree.” In real life, she’s a teen with her parents in an Olive Garden. He’s in a Wal-Mart aisle. They are about to withdraw back into their carapaces. And so here we are, convincingly lost amid America’s memes and mirrors in 2024, among what Joyce in “Finnegans Wake” called “the unhappitents of the earth.”

Levy is a young Bennington graduate from California, who has published stories in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant. She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she was encouraged to publish “My First Book” too soon. The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones, a few of which I suspect were typed on a MacBook a long time ago.

In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.

A few of these characters are coddled; they are expensively educated; they have money. (One is a “post-leftist with a nicotine addiction and a vagina and white privilege and obsessive-compulsive disorder and a birthday in September.”) Others do not.

What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.” Her characters are desperate and unfulfilled. They jockey for dominance in unlighted territory.

There is an interesting sense here of young people brought up amid a war — a cultural one. Some push back against prevailing orthodoxies. One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.” She further thinks that writing supposedly blackhearted men’s names on a Google spreadsheet “does not make you a good person.” She dislikes the urge to denounce. She is wary of “people using faux sincerity and sentimentality for political gain.” It is possible to be a person of the left, in her estimation, without checking your BS detector at the door.

Levy is eyeballing a generation so crammed with cultural information that everything threatens to tip over into a joke. But jokes are where the trouble lies. When no one gets your joke, suddenly you’re Jonathan Swift accused of wanting to eat babies. The tranquilizing pills that you take for poise won’t help you now.

Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes. “We even make memes about this,” Levy writes, “our failure to understand anything but memes.” Her characters beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly to their TikToks. The big blue planet steams around them.

The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on. Wish this stuff into the cornfield. It is out of place here.

“Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster,” Saul Bellow wrote in “Humboldt’s Gift.” Is a hot take a stab at being found? Levy can dispense these as well as anyone. Crucially, though, she understands that “a hot take won’t keep you warm at night.”

MY FIRST BOOK | By Honor Levy | Penguin Press | 212 pp. | $27