“Suckled on ennui, ASMR and clickbait” – My First Book by Honor Levy

Cards on the table: I’m forty-three years old, which makes me not just a Millennial, but a Geriatric one, or possibly (probably) – brace yourselves – one of Coupland’s bewildered Gen X. Or: I grew up in an analogue world, because digital life didn’t segue into the mainstream (just Ask Jeeves) until I was at university. Honor Levy, though, is full-on Gen Z, or a Zoomer, or at least she’s speaking on their behalf, a generation raised online, meme-saturated, anime-obsessed, live-streaming, vaporwave on YouTube, Ketamine and Adderall on prescription. My First Book is her first book: a story collection dragging all this onto the page, the existential angsting of a subculture suckled on ennui, ASMR and clickbait.

It’s all very 21^st Century: Japan and medieval European saints via LA, incels and cancel culture and rape jokes, edgelords on grand tours to Athens and Paris before their Berlin shows open, sad girls and the end of the world. Or is it? It’s declarative and affectless, pondering simulacra, namedropping Spy Kids and the Sun King and Kathy Acker: isn’t this…the 1990s? Less Than Zero? Ballard and Baudrillard? Even – later, and more problematically, Tao Lin? The stories are more or less narrative-free zones – loose scenarios as vehicles for cultural commentary – such that they read more like tentative essays than fiction, and perhaps that’s a commentary on the role, or lack thereof, of fiction in the contemporary moment, but if you swap out emojis and 4chan for the Eden-Olympia of Super-Cannes or the television of Infinite Jest, the commentary itself seems unchanged: are we post-history or not? I mean, obviously not, right? But you might not know it from here. Now, again, maybe this is a deliberate strategy – plenty of Levy’s narrators are highly self-aware – but the effect isn’t particularly discernible from that of pre-9/11 literary postmodernity. Everything is immense and scary, the kids are on cocaine, there’s no clear exit strategy.

But to sidestep all that, there is, I imagine, a lot of recognition comedy here for younger (white, Western, well-to-do) readers. For aging academics like myself, there’s plenty of learning material: what do you know about hikikomori or waifus? The opening piece, ‘Love Story’ is a punch in the face for the complacent reader of literary fiction: ‘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. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness.’ And on, and on. It’s the ice-bucket challenge (see: Gen Z) of idiomatic intros, and the other stories follow suit as a series of lost kids (back to Easton Ellis) negotiate the culture wars and their own white privilege. It’s a cultural snapshot that’ll either make you baulk or snap your fingers (so relatable!). But as a piece of commentary, fiction or otherwise, it’s uneven. We get lengthy faux-insightful passages – ‘[Babies and books] both are time-consuming. They both can be carried. They both bring comfort. They both smell good. They both can be thrown across a room’ – that might have been funny with a little more style brought to bear at the level of the sentence. At times the humour and the critique of this culture does shine through: on the contemporary usage of the term ‘safe spaces’, the narrator of the list-story ‘Z was for Zoomer’ remarks, ‘When the fires come, I know where I will be, right by the self-care station with the mandalas and the chai.’ Mostly, though, the stories reiterate the same point, in the same diction, with the same rhythm and tone. If you like it, you’ll love this, but if you’ve got doubts, you’ll get pretty fed up. Yes, you’ll think, I get it: everything is intertextual and flattened and authentically inauthentic, and we’re all post-everything.

Any Cop?: I don’t think I’m too old for this; I think I’m old enough to remember the last few times this was done. Does that matter? Levy would probably say no.

Valerie O’Riordan