My First Review

My First Book by Honor Levy. Penguin Press, 224 pages. 2024.

If Honor Levy isn’t exactly a feminist, then her writing has always betrayed an interest in unequal social relations between men and women. Take her story “Good Boys,” which was originally published on The New Yorker’s website in the summer of 2020, when Levy was a senior in college. The protagonist is a young woman hanging out on a rooftop in Paris with four boys who are in the midst of a study-abroad romp through Europe. She is a keen, silent observer of them: their hair, tanned stomachs, the way they call certain girls “dogs.” She instinctively understands what the boys mean by this: “They don’t mean bitches. They just mean dogs.” Most of the story ruminates on the taxonomic difference between a girl and a dog—or a girl who gets to hang with boys on a roof in Paris, and one who doesn’t.

But the narrator’s knowledge of exactly what a dog is, and how not to be one, is the very thing that threatens her position as a non-dog. Levy conveys this feeling of precariousness through the narrator’s anxiety about how high up they all are: “I know that if one of the boys fell off the rooftop he’d die,” she thinks. The image of them falling to their deaths offers some solace; if she could just picture it, “it would be easier to remember that I’m in Paris. It would be easier to laugh like Zoe, like Tinkerbell, like a real girl, a girl who is not a dog.” The story ends with an exhaustive list of dog-like behaviors: “Dogs are girls who care. Girls who ask too many questions are dogs. . . Dogs don’t want the boys to be happy.” The narrator’s awareness of the conditions of her inclusion ultimately accomplishes a subtle inversion, making the boys and their misogyny the story’s object. They are the real dogs—get it? They’re “Good Boys.”

Almost a year after The New Yorker published her story, Honor Levy published “ଳ gud bowoyz” on her Substack, a version of “Good Boys” transposed into a particular form of brain-fried internet speak, applying wingdings, typos, and other online-isms to mock and undermine the writing—similar to when people tYpe LiKE ThiS. “dogz ✜ disadvantagd gendar identiteh ヾ☏༓ care. Disadvantagd gendar identiteh ヾ☏༓ ask 2 many quesshonz ✜,” reads a typical sentence. By substituting “dogs” with a misspelled rendition of “disadvantaged gender identity,” the spoof version of “Good Boys” ironically clarifies—and immediately reels from—the sincere feminist impulse in the story’s original form. Here, Levy wields an online idiom as a blunt-force instrument against the text, corroding it, turning it ridiculous, and literally making it less legible. It’s an avoidance strategy—a wish that the language of the internet might shield Levy from the vulnerability and embarrassment of political feeling and, well, feminism.

“ଳ gud bowoyz” does not appear in Levy’s first book, titled My First Book, but the story’s invocation of the internet to destroy earnestness and sincerity abounds. Her protagonists are young and online, they have expensive liberal arts degrees, and they want Adderall. They grew up in liberal cities and have reactionary politics. The Plan B pills they swallow, the pro-anorexia blogs they visit, and the problematic men they hang out with belong to a specific, gendered experience that is impossible to describe without talking about the internet, but the internet isn’t the subject of these stories so much as their setting. Despite this, the marketing copy around My First Book, in addition to many of its reviews, has breathlessly heralded Levy as a Zoomer prophet of the perennially logged on. Really, the book is about being, to use modern internet parlance, “just a girl.”

This characterization likely has to do with Levy’s origins as a prolific poster. Before she was ever published as a writer, she amassed a following across various social media platforms for her posts—let’s call them digital art objects—which captured the indeterminately ironic, unintelligible yet evocative vibe that she tries to replicate in her prose. One of her old TikToks features what seems to be her disembodied face floating above an image of a rushing stream, paired with sped-up audio of the serenity prayer. In another, she photoshops herself floating in a barge down a beautiful, digitally rendered lake, pixelated butterflies fluttering about her. “I’ve done it,” the audio narration says. “I’ve gone outside, I’m touching grass . . . but there’s no ketamine out here, so I’m going back in.” For those of us also raised online, these posts make sense, they’re even “relatable,” but it would be futile to explain in words what they mean. They’re posts: they exist online, where they’re reducible only to the other internet references that comprise them.

The person who first spotted the literary potential in Levy’s posts was Giancarlo DiTrapano, the late founder and editor of Tyrant Books. “Everything he said made me want to start a book,” Levy told The Paris Review. “So I did, because he asked.” DiTrapano was known for spotting and coaxing literary talent from unexpected places, and he published all manner of experimental literature. My First Book was intended to come out with Tyrant, but when DiTrapano died in 2021, the book wound up at Penguin Press. It feels safe to say that a Big Five imprint was not the right home for her talents; rather than a development, the book too often reads like a belabored elaboration on the things that made Levy’s writing promising—her niche internet fluency, her humor, the tendency toward iconoclasm evinced in “guwud boyoz”—repeated ad nauseam until a contractually obliged word count was met.

The first page of Levy’s book, the opening to “Love Story,” has circulated widely on social media, where it was mocked for its total, exorbitant onlineness: “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K.” These are the terms under which we are introduced to My First Book—abandon hope, all ye whose hours of daily screen time are in the lowly single digits. The story is an archetypal digital romance, desire and loneliness conveyed through a manic cycle of forum speak, DM transcripts, and the occasional Shakespeare reference: “Please r u their? *there lol im so sad 2day…i feel so alone…i know ur online………..” writes the girl to the boy. She sends him a nude; he is disgusted. “Ew. Frailty. Roastie. Deuteronomy 22:20-21. Done. Get thee to a nunnery. Begone thot,” he thinks. “Love Story” typifies not just the language of digital romantic connection but also the particular sexual attitudes that are its direct effect: sexual conservatism paired with a neurotic fixation on how to make the body more appealing to the opposite sex. For women, this is plainly about thinness (the girl is a “starving holy hikikomori virgin femcel”), while men must maintain a frightening fidelity to their biometrics, a sort of e-phrenology of desirability. Here, Levy’s subject matter is how the internet abets and magnifies differences in gendered experience.

This is the real source of the conflict in the story, not misogyny. In “Love Story,” the digital world serves up an unlimited vocabulary of alienation and self-hatred. But this vast language inevitably produces the generic: two unnamed avatars and their algorithmically determined desires. Until, that is, the boy is overcome by a new set of references: “Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld, every pair of lovers ever intertwined in eternal embrace, Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward.” Reminded of the glorious Western canon that the nude from his Discord waifu ultimately issued from, he deletes his in-progress tirade and replaces it with “No no i want you.” At the end of the story, he longs to “reach through the black glass, through all the 0s and 1s, through the mess of wires under the ocean, through the cloud, to grab her, take her in his big gym arms and hold her, be one.” “Love Story” can essentially be condensed into the prescription to “reject modernity, embrace tradition”; like so much else in My First Book, her critique of contemporary life eventuates in a reactionary traditionalism. What makes the story interesting is how she remains faithful to the language of her source material to make her point. In this way, “Love Story” approximates what her posting so consistently achieves: a critique of the internet, and internet experience, from inside of it.

It’s when Levy has to come up with the sentences on her own that her depiction of the internet as a bleak, atomized place becomes more obvious and less aesthetically interesting. Take the story “Internet Girl.” The premise is simple: a twenty-one-year-old narrator recalls being an eleven-year-old girl who logs on for the first time and encounters a bizarre, vertiginous dreamscape. One minute she’s playing kids’ games like Neopets, then “dress-down games” with “bad scary men in the blue light.” Here again, Levy foregrounds a gendered experience in her writing—for young girls, the internet is a place where sexual discovery and sexual violation blend, often imperceptibly, into one another. Growing up online has repercussions: ten years later, the narrator in “Internet Girl” has aged into an Internet Woman with questions that Google can’t quite answer: “Who am I?” she wonders. “Why am I sad? How do I know if it was fair?”

When the narrator was eleven, she felt the internet held “immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity.” At age twenty-one, she is starving, jaded, suffering: “Through the immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity, I learned to look at photos of who I wanted to become, to stare at the empty spaces I wanted to have, to run to 7-Eleven and chug Diet Coke, to imagine maggots crawling through the birthday cake.” She’s lost hope that the internet might be anything other than a vessel for the specific miseries and neuroses that afflict her—the idea that it could be meaningfully different, or meaningful at all for someone else, is foreclosed. The internet has only given her an eating disorder and a feeling of total and utter despair; thus any politics of solidarity that cohere there are subject to her derision, written off as fake or cringe: “[The internet is] where we make posts like #metoo and #resist. Where we shout into our little echo chamber about evil Russian spies and our big bad president. Where we virtue signal and like and cancel and crowdfund and try to free our nipples.”

The burgeoning reactionary pose at the end of “Internet Girl” reaches its apotheosis in “Cancel Me,” an anti-#MeToo screed that thrums with anger, rage, and political frustration—the exact opposite of the detached affect Levy attempts elsewhere. The narrator ruminates obsessively on all manner of canceled men: Kanye West; former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein; three cancelled friends named Piggy, Jack, and Roger. Her feelings about these friends and the allegations leveled against them are complex and uncertain, and she feels implicated, somehow, by this uncertainty: when she hears that Piggy may have hurt a woman, she is paralyzed. “Apparently allegedly he hurt her. I didn’t care or didn’t want to care or cared too much and didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t support her or call him out or yell or fight or tweet. I did nothing.”

The narrator in “Cancel Me” begins in a similar position as the one in “Good Boys”—she’s hanging out with men who have perpetrated, in word or deed, misogynistic wrongdoing, but she is fairly ambivalent about the wrongdoing itself—she’s just there, ruminating on the social dynamics at play. In “Good Boys,” this silence grants her social status, but in “Cancel Me,” her alignment with the boys ostracizes her, leaving her out in the cold. The rules have changed, and it’s all because of those pesky feminists: while she’s shivering on the street, “the skinny silhouettes of Barnard girls take no notice.”

But it’s not just loyalty that keeps the narrator aligned with the cancelled boys: it’s identification. She shares an anecdote from her own brush with the woke mind virus, when she went on a college radio show and made sarcastic remarks about trigger warnings. The podcast hosts’ eyes flashed, and this upset her because she was “so tired of being careful.” An effusion of edginess ensues: “In my opinion, catcalling is not like assault, protests are not like revolution, and shock is not like fear.” Never mind the fact that no serious person has ever equated any of those things—as the phantasm of the chastising feminist becomes more elaborately drawn, the narrator’s defensiveness spirals out of control. Even her reader catches a stray: “SORRY! WAS THE PRESENT TENSE ANNOYING? DO THESE CAPITAL LETTERS BOTHER YOU? SO SORRY!”

Reflecting on “Cancel Me” earlier this year, Levy told Vanity Fair, “That story, it makes me recoil.” She notes that the attitudes it espoused were ones she held for a while, but no longer. “There are bad people who deserve to be canceled. That story doesn’t take that into account at all,” she says. “Reading it, I’m like, oh my God, I need to cancel this narrator.” If her attitude has shifted, Levy’s impulse toward self-effacement persists.

My favorite story in My First Book is “Do It Coward.” The narrator is standing in an old video arcade in Chinatown, where she experiences something like spiritual rapture, a fleeting oneness with humanity. The arcade is difficult to describe; it’s awesome; it’s surreal: it is “an institution with endless potential for extended metaphor, hauntological analysis, describable only with untranslatable German words for nostalgia, sort of too perfect I’m shook.” She says the arcade is “like Rome,” but it sounds more like the internet. At the same time, something about its limitlessness makes her sad: she is “emo asf about all these lost futures.” Paralyzed by visions of perfect totality, she recognizes that the experience demands a kind of conviction that she does not have. “A secular Jewish lack of belief, paired with my feminine lack of logic and my incredibly, horrifyingly, unnatural pagan good luck had me frozen and dying and faithless.”

Is it wishful to think she’s writing about writing here, that the “pagan good luck” is the success she’s had in her own career and the scrutiny she’s faced as a result? “You’re a freak and it’s your show,” she writes elsewhere. “Everyone claps for you and laughs at you. So repelling, so enchanting, what abjection, how sublime.” The story’s consciousness flits between relishing the grandiose chaos of existence and feeling totally, personally unequipped to handle it; she might be tripping balls, or she might be describing being a very young woman with a major book deal. “All this nothing I’ve been doing for so long, yet somehow I’ve gotten here anyway, to this meeting between my system of sensory analysis and the message. Thank God.” Being tasked with writing My First Book is biblical providence, but she’s just a Jewish girl with a dependence on “good speed.”

This is the one place in the entire book where the despair and hollowness that thrums beneath Levy’s writing is laid bare and transcended—it’s not deformed into a screed about safe spaces or memed beyond recognition, it’s just there, both the thing that makes the writing necessary and also what makes it feel impossible. “Do it Coward” is a reprieve from prose that otherwise resents itself for failing to replicate the vibey ephemerality of a post. This time, Levy has revealed her hand, her sleeves are empty of tricks, she’s naked and afraid. Is this vulnerability? Is it cringe? The Honor Levy who wrote most of My First Book would certainly think so. But times change, and people do too. “I’m grown up and full of shame,” she told Vanity Fair. That shame itself can be a meaningful—if not crucial—experience to write from is wisdom she only glancingly arrives at in her first book. “After the arcade, now I’m the coward just doing it,” she writes near the end of the story. Let’s see what she does next.