"Each of us who grew up on the internet filled our squishy, spongy brains with hyper-specific signifiers," Honor Levy writes half-way through her delightful debut, My First Book. But here lies the double-edged sword of a short story collection like Levy's: when you pack a story with "hyper-specific signifiers," do you risk alienating an audience? A part of me worries for the reader not invited to the party. Another part of me is too busy having a good time.
At first glance, My First Book is primarily concerned with the anxieties of living in our present day, where the boundaries between digital and real have seemingly collapsed, where we're constantly surveilled, our digital footprints impossible to erase. The internet is forever. Through this prism, in turns hyper-topical and increasingly disquieting, Levy grapples with questions of identity and intimacy and drugs and cancellation and the war on terror. In "Love Story," for example, a gym bro simps for a trad wife online, finding a "pill-popper pixie dream girl" quick to toss nudes in his direction instead—it's a love story like many we've seen before. Like "Orpheus and Eurydice… Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward," Levy writes. In "Internet Girl," our protagonist navigates a decade in a changing digital landscape, one moment starving her Neopets, the next striving to BE BEST, embodying the infamous words of Melania Trump's first initiative. And in "Pillow Angels," the protagonist is a terrorist reborn: "One second, I was a martyr, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then, there with a puff, I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress in Los Angeles. That's a fun fact about me." It might all sound dizzying and absurd, but in Levy's hands, this becomes a rich text, more sincere and nuanced than might initially appear. And while My First Book feels like a cultural artifact, one latched onto our present time, its muscularity—at a sentence-level, at a story-level—gives it the possibility to live beyond the present it describes in such vivid detail.
Levy's writing bears the markers and language of the internet. Several stories feel so online that it's easy for references to go over one's head. A narrow selection from one story: Damn Bitch, You Live Like This?; time-lapse of a rotting fox GIF; real eyes realize real lies; feral girl summer; run through; and so many more. It's all very Rawr XD, which won't be for everyone. (A fifty-page glossary helps readers interpret some internet speak, which is also the collection at its most tedious.) Even mentions of seed oils and aspartame carry additional depth if you're online enough. But the stories careen with energy, the prose whittled down into pixel-sharp perfection. You don't need to know every online reference to enjoy My First Book. The fact the collection is linked, at least, on a thematic level—the (im)possibility of living in our techno age—grounds the reader from getting too lost in the sauce. And despite what the pulled quotes might suggest, there's a striking sincerity present throughout the collection.
In "Cancel Me," a story that is otherwise ambivalent towards cancellation, the narrator considers Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony: "The laugh, this is what really gets me. This is what hurts me the most… They stood over her and looked at each other, shared something secret in their smiles, and laughed." This moment is notable for its candor, and there are many earnest, and tender, instants in the collection. Whatever blasé asides pepper the stories feel more like a young person trying to wrangle the truths of society than anything else. What might be the collection's downfall then is also one of its strengths: the naked bravery of a young person making sense of it all, and often failing. There's a confessional nature to Levy's work.
Her stories have an existential bent, considering questions of life and death, and spirituality—timeless themes. Her references aren't empty; they don't exist for reference's sake. They exist to depict the confusing, stimulating nature of our too-online, internet-dependent world. In one story, the young protagonist wants to wake up her parents to "ask them who she is." Levy writes, "If she woke them up… she would tell them that, like them, she is dust and she will return to dust. The question is what will remain." Another story ends with the narrator yelling: "I'm yelling because I don't know the answer. Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Can anybody tell me?" Through all the humorous remarks come these moments that call attention to the lonely nature of the internet, which we have accepted as normal. "Sense itself had long since come to an end. Lots of ends had come and gone," Levy writes. But there's a comfortable resignation present too. Hedonism is evoked, even if laden with faint traces of guilt: "Life is harsh and cruel and smiling makes my cheeks hurt. Doom is contagious, but maybe we've found a vaccine."
Taken all together, it's easy to read My First Book as apologia in itself. That the internet may have molded us into this way. But who cares, because isn't it great?
FICTION
My First Book
By Honor Levy
Penguin Press
Published May 14, 2024
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