My Generation: Honor Levy’s My First Book & the Old Shock of the New

Early in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, the socially omniscient Charles Bowen remarks of the protagonist Undine Spragg: “… she’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.” Undine’s ascent via marriage from small town to the echelons of New York is both harbinger of destruction to a society so petrified in their ways as to be an insect in amber and unstoppable trajectory fixed upon nothing but what exists in the moment. Class and generation clash, leaving, as they are wont to do, the old guard holding on to the vestiges of their ruins while the upstarts create a new world according to their desires.

The short stories of My First Book, the debut of Honor Levy, echo the sentiment of Wharton’s sharp and often caustic observations in a literary sense. It will be for others to delve into the more specific relevance or not of Levy’s discourse-notorious rise in terms of her education and social background (Bennington College and Dimes Square); what is of interest here is the generational voice in literature and an existence almost solely through the various outposts of social media influencing writing and its reception. The first, “Love Story”, opens with two people meeting online and experiencing each other entirely through the internet’s language and images. The prose is hyper in its attention span to the point of annoyance, but this is also its point: in the accelerated world, everything from emotion to looks will comply:

They viewed each other’s bodies, disembodied, laid out still, frozen shining cold in blue light, Liquid Crystal Display. He was posting physique, gym selfies, Bruegel landscapes, oh look how wide his lats look, he’s growing angel wings. Flexed, he could flap right up to the sun. She was posting thinspo, puppy-dog-filter webcam progress shots, Bosch triptychs, wow you could put a whole stained-glass window in that thigh gap, the crucifixion maybe. Through her cathedral thigh gap you could see the sky where right-winged Icarus went flying by.

This parade of imagery is the successor to what early MTV gave Gen X in its between-segment idents by filmmakers such as the Brothers Quay (some of which directly reference writers like Bruno Schulz) and the then-ground-breaking videos for Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Peter Gabriel’s “Big”. Whether one views them as seminal or with the quaint regard of technological aesthetics gone the way of Shelley’s ruined Ozymandias, they exist primarily for their specific generations. To mangle Orwell, all art may be culture, but some is more cultural than others. The moment announces; time decides.

The stories of My First Book exist for that moment, to the point where one realises just how much happens within it, is subsequently forgotten, and what vast amounts of useless information we are subject to. More importantly, that there is a generation which sees it as all in a quasi-divine light, vital and necessary for interaction, as in “Do It Coward”:

Remember #CuttingForBieber? That really happened for real, no cap. That really happened, and so did a lot of other crazy stuff. Like freshman year and The Great Flood. #CuttingForBieber. That’s devotion. That’s what it is.

Levy’s characters think at the speed of typing, often in all caps and acronyms, searching for meaning in an online world which doesn’t stop when offline; there is no real “off” or escape in these stories. The internet is the new blood, constantly throbbing in the temples. She is astute enough to bring together figures like Balzac, MFK Fisher, and Nicolas Cage to make frenetic points about consumption, information, and the image: the holy trinity.

The question of whether an author recognises the connectivity of their own references is to a degree irrelevant. Levy’s descriptions reflect everyone from fellow Bennington alumnus Bret Easton Ellis (self-aware in its vanity) to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”—not in the obvious Icarus, but the observation that much of what is interesting here takes place outside of the purview of the deliberate writing. One can read Levy as only words on a page, without rhythm or the benefit of generational reference, but to do so is wilfully obtuse. The language of the keyboard and seductions of fractured images serve to emphasise the obscenely romantic and brutal mentality of human connection through technology. The meet-cutes of “Love Story” are in fact both ugly in their own ways: one full of self-loathing, the other a fury of unrealistic sexual expectation, in the end separately collapsing and coming together in desperate, secret needs. What Levy understands beneath the manic, agitated, and often longing prose is that while everyone needs, almost no one receives.

There are deliberate provocations throughout My First Book in references from the Haplogroups and “trad wife … tard wife” in “Love Story”, to the escape wish of the protagonist of “Brief Interview with a Beautiful Boy”: “all he does is … think about Steve Bannon … what is the most transcendental thing possible? He’s thinking private military”. Levy’s characters are mostly the same gilded and/or disaffected youth of a lineage including Fitzgerald, the forgotten John Stewart Wynne, and Ellis with the added hell of a 24/7 existence online; a reflection of a reflection of nothingness at an age where “nothing” used to mean a precious cloak of anonymity under which one could develop. This overexposure results in its natural outcome: characters are emotionally stunted, having been raised at the speed of accelerated technology, allowing for a genuine pathos which for the most part never materialises in the irreparably numb characters of Ellis. Because of the internet, Levy’s characters suffer from an excess of desire; sexual, existential, and emotional, they are destined to drown in an ocean of their own information and wants.

John Stewart Wynne’s now out-of-print 1994 book of short stories, The Other World, came closest to recalling Levy’s particular brand of desperate desire, if not in language, then emotion (and its lack). Absent from most literary discussion now, Wynne’s stories move between abject brutality, longing, and disaffect, foreshadowing incel culture in the title story and a fairy-tale-like telling of a wealthy trans youth’s realisations over Christmas in New York City in “Raphael”. While the generational juxtaposition with My First Book is apparent in its prose, Wynne’s stories could be easily re-imagined through Levy’s hyperactive text, and vice versa. Writers of opposing generations, both celebrated and lost, are never as different as they seem. Timely outrage around a writer or their writing has a tendency to melt into time; what remains or not will only ever be the work.

It is worth noting that this leaves open the question of the writing being of ultimately positive or negative merit. The hyperbole of a “voice of a generation” which has been aimed at Levy (who, in an interview with The Cut, herself questions). Within its subjectivity, the real question regarding Levy and writers of her generation writing to and for a very specific audience is are we as reviewers applying the correct parameters? Have we now come to a point in literature and, more broadly, in how we interact in a digital world, where we must accept that while the old measurements of writing will always apply to an extent, they are no longer quite as relevant as they were to what is and what will come?

This is something which will no doubt unnerve and provoke anger. But like Undine Spragg or Levy’s writing, it simply is: they are products of a system and an age which is forever moving forward with decreasing limits of fixed attention and increasing desire. The stories of My First Book are, as no doubt Charles Bowen would have noted with an anthropological eye, the world eager for a self-regarding acceleration.

Tomoé Hill’s writing has been featured in places such as Vestoj, MAP Magazine, Socrates on the Beach, Exacting Clam, The London Magazine, and Music & Literature, as well as the anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books) and Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University). Her book Songs for Olympia, a response to The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat by Michel Leiris will be published in 2023 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Twitter @CuriosoTheGreat.