Flat Earth Catalog

Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy. Catapult, 224 pages. 2025.

The most humiliating aspect of being alive today, I suppose, is feeling like one is living through a single, unending commercial break. As the human race disintegrates into increasingly atomized particles of recluses and rejects, one can only “stay in touch” through increasingly dystopian social media feeds that consist mostly of ads, whether traditional influencer trash and/or semi-real short-form video. People no longer have “drinks,” they have “bevvies” and, at the most crucial junctures in their lives, speak in a wooden language learned from TikTok self-help videos. Music, when not actual AI, is now mainly a vehicle for parasocial relationships with carefully curated celebrities whose music is prepared by the same songwriters and producers, with the choice of Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey for idol a matter of identity work as opposed to taste. Increasingly, our choices are between two subsidiaries of the same conglomerate; within a few decades, perhaps there will be no real choice at all.

Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth is a small novel—“razor-thin,” as one blurb puts it—that purports to be “Speedboat for the Adderall generation.”  From the book’s first lines, “In August, all the pharmacies in New York run out of Adderall,” through the following ones about Catholicism, raw milk, and vaccine hesitancy, we know where we are, what demographic is under interrogation, and for whom. Downstream of the pharmacological and technological experiments of Alt Lit (whose perpetrators took pills, went to NYU, and used Gmail) and the legacy of Tyrant Books, internet literature represents contemporary youthful existence with outré topics like incels, raw milk, and phones, and a tone of “schizo” post-ironic irreverence. Case in point the writing published in Forever magazine, which Levy cofounded shortly after Covid lockdowns ended, which primarily published teeny-tiny pieces full of references to pills, Catholic schoolgirls, and the Big Bad Web, along with the occasional Sheila Heti or Tao Lin interview or story. Tyrant and Muumuu House seemed to derive from an editor’s singular and consistent vision; Forever, which began by publishing Delicious Tacos and more recently held a book launch for Taylor Lorenz, has taken a more lower-case catholic approach. Just as prominent as its website and its occasional print issues have been its parties, known for promising “no readings.” Its all-female editorial board has taken a distinct approach to publishing, appearing in numerous photoshoots, including for Los Angeles Apparel. Its website has sold both underwear with the infinity sign and $200 stuffed bunny rabbits “pre-cuddled by each Forever Girl,” Pocket Bible included. As the headline of their Interview Magazine feature went, “The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards.”

How is one supposed to make art in this environment? “One cannot separate literature and life,” Graham Greene once wrote, for “if an age appears creatively, poetically, empty, it is fair to assume that life too had its emptiness, was carried on at a lower, less passionate level.” Or as Levy told Cultured Magazine in yet another recent feature on literary It Girls: “Everyone in this book is really two-dimensional—I wasn’t interested in writing nuanced female characters.”

This is a book that takes place upon the flat earth, after all: a world of flat, dull characters who do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing for each other but a mild and mutual disdain. The cover of this book is taken from Stewart Brand’s utopian Whole Earth Catalog; here, the Whole Earth appears only when a sculptor “rails lines” off it. The flat earth, though, is everywhere. “Flat Earth,” in the text, is the title of a short film Avery’s best friend Frances makes about QAnoners across America (they are both in a media studies master’s program, though by the time Avery is taking an autofiction workshop from a figure closely resembling Lynne Tillman, it appears we are squarely in Columbia MFA territory). Because there’s an Adderall shortage, Avery decides to accompany Frances on her trip. These first dozen or so pages are some of the breeziest in the book, emo little waifs of paragraphs about purity balls and rednecks with the occasional regrettable bit like, “I remember that summer as blurred and grainy, the color desaturated.” After they finish filming, however, Frances announces that she intends to marry a “day laborer” back in her native North Carolina. This is a bit surprising, as Frances, who is an heiress, also sugar babies, but apparently she has decided to become trad, as is made amply clear in a lengthy wedding scene which includes no church service but a Springbreakers-esque montage of Confederate bikinis, AK-47s, and similes like “They tucked dip into their upper lips like a sacrament.” Frances remains; Avery returns to her life in New York, which consists of two things: slightly masochistic sex with older men and attempts to write. From here comes her own Flat Earth: “The players in the downtown art scene weren’t so different from the flat-earthers in flyover country—we each thought we had some unique insight into the way the world works, but in reality, we were all part of one big consensus machine, downstream from everything.” Indeed, virtually every conversation in the book is borrowed from a familiar word bank of half-remembered Twitter theories (5G, receipt paper, vim retention) and shallow references to publishing (everyone wants to publish “a book” and “be a writer,” Avery included).

As in so many recent millennial novels, the main action here is Avery’s pull toward twisted older men. She sees a “dominant older man” who talks about jihadists in bed and (Frances reminds her) is “on multiple government watchlists,” because even though she thinks he is horrible he is “sufficiently violent” and gives her “rules on Sailor Moon stationery.” She sees a law professor with an “offstage” wife and children who is constantly calling her variations of stupid. She sees a sculptor even though she thinks his art is “extraordinarily stupid” (she tells him that it is “unbelievable”). These are the only exchanges that arouse any real interest from her. Even when she attends the funeral of a college friend, it is with an attitude of remove: she says she attends only because she “likes Catholic rituals.”

Avery’s quest for tuition money first leads her to go on, at Frances’ suggestion, a bit of sugar dating. And then, the novel emerges from its hazy, nightmare repetition when Avery, who has been taking a lot of Ambien, receives an email informing her that she now has a job at the “Patriarchy” app (no interview required). As she explains, she “would rather kill myself than give up taking taxicabs or having my hair professionally washed.” At the Patriarchy company, which has the divisions “Fiction” and “Reality,” she is hired to write cultural reports about dates with rich right-wing men. As the pages of “The Patriarchy Report” evidence, she has apparently been hired to write autofiction (though they soon enough fire her, preferring their “hypersexual Catholic girl” employee with a “famous fascist” father).

Over the ensuing pages, the Patriarchy plot line more or less disappears, replaced by Avery’s resentment as she watches Frances’s film succeed and hears her complain to her mother about her cleaning lady (disdain apparently so marked that, when Frances slits her wrist after finding out she’s pregnant, Avery sleeps with her husband; she doesn’t care). In the last few pages, though, Avery again wants some money. She goes on a final date with a right-wing guy, who lets her withdraw some money from the ATM. On one of the earliest pages, Avery says “I squeezed my eyes shut and asked the universe for a sign, but when I opened them all I saw was the ATM blinking GET CASH.” And as the book concludes, “I closed my eyes, held out my hand, and waited for the money.”

Flat Earth is a provocative commentary on an artistic field reduced to its most superficial and craven impulses. Each art show, screening, or even party she attends is a different hollow self-promotional event (and most are easily recognizable as places mentioned in the New York Times Style pages). Her best and only friend Frances’s film, about middle America, is just another empty marketing event: “she’d spent the last six years insisting that the center of the country was all slaughterhouses—but she had a way of anticipating cultural tides, spotting telegenic potential in decay.” Even Avery herself does not read, nor consume media of any sort, other than Infowars and To Catch a Predator (she has a Bolaño tattoo, but has never read him; she at one point pretends to read a copy of A Fan’s Notes). It is not clear why Avery wants to write, besides to finish her thesis. Each character in this book is so profoundly indifferent to every other that it is at times unclear why the reader should feel any different.

And indeed, Avery recognizes these limitations: “When I did manage to write, there was no plot, just prose,” she laments. “I wonder sometimes whether I should be working on something substantial,” she thinks. “A project about my parents, my family, but when I sit down to write, all that ever comes out is alienating sex.” The most present theme in the book is the economy of female beauty in the downtown scene (“don’t make being a young woman your whole artistic oeuvre,” her elderly professor tells her), and its most surprising moments are those when Avery ruthlessly reflects on her own aging (saying that her breasts are “beginning to sag,” that a critic at a party tells her hello and then “turned to talk to someone younger,” that if she “lies about [her] age” she “could do this for a few more years”). She is obsessed with her declining sexual value, and these reflections are strikingly alike, whether they involve men paying her for dates, an ex commenting on her declining fertility, or critics turning away from her pathos to “talk to someone younger.” In an astonishing sentence early on, she writes that “I regarded my reflection in the mirror with a mix of vanity and repugnance, globbed sunscreen onto my face haphazardly as if I were my own petulant child”; in an equally deft moment, she describes her own life as merely a series of “minor and mostly voluntary humiliations.” Her eye on these cold calculations can be truly inventive: “All my exchanges with men felt like prostitution at bottom; I had the sense that there was some invisible administrative bureaucracy underpinning everything, that if the Law Professor died unexpectedly, I would wake up and find myself transferred to his brother.”

At other times, though, the narrator falls into more tired recitations that seem more curated for the market than in criticism of it: “It’s true that I have a technically perfect body, but I’m hopeless at sex and secretly conservative”; “I found an old photo of my body. I looked fertile, ready”; “I had a perfect hourglass figure.” The chapters of the book are each separated by a few pages of a kind of non-narrative block of Twitter speak, much of it anti-feminist (“Gynocracy has failed, and everyone agrees that we are moving toward a masculine vision of America”; “We try to temper the feeling that we would rather be folding a man’s laundry than reading a book”; “When surveyed, all of us say we prefer to stay home and wash dishes.”) I lost track of how many times the word fertile appeared; likewise for the word feral. Around half a dozen times, Avery says she wants a baby; wants a ring. And yet at other times, Avery comes out with rather wooden declarations of feminism such as “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable? Like galleries.” Perhaps this is all a joke—but does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques? Why is such a narrator, rather than be permitted to exist with her profound, world-destroying nihilism, instead drawn back, again and again, to tired references to men slapping her “perfect” body and even less convincing wishes they’d knock her up?

Still less coherently, the novel insists quite heavy-handedly on a theme of economic justice: that it is, in the words of the back matter, about having a “more privileged friend.” Avery describes how her supposedly single mother (never mind her references, elsewhere, to her autistic genius dad’s Acura and memories of falling asleep in her parents’ Subaru) would, when men from the power company came to turn the power off, invite them in for tea; one imagines Levy thinks the power company, on these occasions, sends someone to flick each switch off one-by-one. On the next page, she recounts her family’s decision to enroll her in therapy and finally a Waldorf school; one wonders if Levy knows about the existence of public school. The book vacillates between representing her as unable to pay subway fare and able to purchase a last-minute trip to Mexico City. At one point she calls herself “impoverished.”

Perhaps, in this debut novel, Levy has ever so subtly shrunken her own voice to the confines of contemporary publishing: to the need to, on the one hand, titillate with cheap, SEO-adapted thrills and on the other hand reassure that we, the reader, really are allied with the working class, the feminist, the outsider. As a result, the novel sits uneasily, constraining itself from strong emotion in either direction, flattening out, instead, into an object of mostly sociological interest.

Contemporary publishing is hostile to the individual consciousness, whether that of an Internet-brained zoomer, a self-hating millennial woman, or any other, because the individual consciousness is, by its very nature, hostile to any consensus position or mass marketing. That is not to say that a consensus position has no purpose; it is to say that when art is reduced to mass marketing and pseudo-political recrimination, prose is pointless. Levy is to be lauded for her attempts to show this state of affairs; but it is to be lamented that she falls into it. Once it becomes apparent that the individual writer is maneuvering and manipulating out of her own consciousness to instead do the bidding of consensus thinking and a publishing industry dedicated to nothing more than staving off its own extinction, reading is pointless. When Levy is allowed to render her own consciousness—when she permits herself to render her own consciousness—with honesty, her writing is singular, and therefore exceptional. The real problem is not QAnon, older men, or the endless quantity of (as she is acutely aware) ever younger women: the problem is the individual spirit itself, a possibility she attempts—not quite convincingly—to dismiss.