Freedom from the Internet
On Honor Levy's first book.
I’m moving, which means I’ve spent the last few days disoriented between pillars of boxes, lost without my daily routine and familiar living space. No time to sit and read, so I’ve been trying audiobooks for the first time. I am halfway through Honor Levy’s new short story collection, My First Book, which is available for free on Spotify. Part of what drew me to it is Levy’s recording: a hypnotic monotone rhythm, which is getting me through the boring chore of packing.
I was also curious about Levy’s book because her name is everywhere right now. She is the newest literary “It Girl,” the bold satirist who will tell us what it’s like to be alive in the metropolitan vanguard of American culture. That I could identify her as such even before I read her work is a marketing coup. But she is more than a brand; artistically, she fulfills the role of a social novelist. Levy’s stories are full of the shibboleths and slang of the generation that grew up on the Internet. The longest story in the book, “Z is for Zoomer,” is an engrossing mock-dictionary of cultural references and signifiers. Part of the enjoyment of reading “the-way-we-live-now” fiction is tracking the ratio between familiarity and novelty: How many of these references and words do I already know? versus How many of them are new to me? It’s a way of figuring out how old you are. Cringe. Going stealth. Looksmaxxing. Wojack. MSNBC solidarity. Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Normie. Bluepilled. Edgelord. Some of these – like Manic Pixie Dream Girl – are already decades old. Others are not part of popular culture in a broad sense. They have limited currency: The cultural scene that Levy inhabits (or, once inhabited) is, I’ve been told, small, New York-centric, and “Right-adjacent.”
Levy also describes the new meanings of old words: “Like used to mean ‘like,’ but we are, like, moments away from its evolution into a catchall term for any expression of acknowledgement or validation.” Other protean terms include “spectrum” and “capitalism” and “autism.” Then there’s her cultural references, which really did make me feel old. I didn’t know who Lil B was. I didn’t know that Greece replaced Hungary as the cheap go-to country for wandering twentysomethings. More importantly, I am old enough to have been spared the fate of spending my teenage years on the Internet. Most of Levy’s stories start in the non-physical space of social media, and only later break out into real life. Social media did not dominate my life until I was already in my late twenties, and so it is hard for me to relate to this new world of online socializing. And yet, I found this line — in the book's first piece, “Love Story” — intensely moving: “His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other.” I still haven’t looked up what an “anime waifu” is. But I’ve been thinking about that line for days.
I am not sure why. It must have something to do with the feeling of it. Love is perennial. Love has nothing to do with the cultural moment or “the way we live now.” People one hundred years ago loved each other, sought each other’s company. Romantic love is, in some sense, a new concept. But human beings have always sought a refuge in love. Everyone has the potential to be moved by that line in Levy’s book.
Maybe there is something of the cultural moment that adds a fragment of extra pathos to that sentence. We all know – we are tired of hearing – about the “epidemic of loneliness,” about the birth dearth, about plummeting marriage rates. The Internet and social media, they say, are largely to blame. “Love Story” embodies the drama of finding love amid all these obstacles. It is an act of defiance against the prognostications of sociologists. “They scrolled into each other” feels like a triumph. “Scrolled” is cynical diction: Scrolling the Internet is not like meeting in real life. But the scrolling leads to love. That’s something, no?
I am overthinking this. In fact, I am probably misinterpreting “Love Story” — a sordid tale that ends unhappily. But this type of overthinking and (let’s call it) adventurous interpretation is, I think, one of the things that art is for. To recap: I listened to Honor Levy’s book first because her performance was compelling. Second, because I wanted to “understand the cultural moment.” Both are largely superficial motivations. Literature is about more than that. You can say that it’s about “transcending the times,” but that is itself now a shibboleth, a cliché, a dead idea. (And Levy alludes to it: Her book includes an epigraph from C. S. Lewis: “For the present is the point at which time touches eternity”).
Maybe a better way to put it is that literature provides — that a few lines of Levy provided for me — a sense of relief and freedom. America today is rife with tales of woe and unfreedom: That we are controlled by the state, by surveillance, by our social status, by the Internet. And yet one line of literature can bring you a taste of what it is like to imagine a world beyond all this. Fresh air and blue skies above the labyrinth.
My only complaint about Levy’s book is that I wish it allowed for more such moments. Her critics (or, as she might call them, her haters) will argue that the use of in-group jargon and Internet-speak will not age well, and in fact will make Levy’s work unintelligible even five years from now. It’s true that her writing sometimes sounds like a sociologist’s field notes, for a book that’s yet to be written.
It’s also true that Flaubert, in his novels, reproduces banal social phrases, as a way of owning them, of transcending the small-mindedness that they represent. Michel Houellebecq does the same, an author with some influence on Levy’s generation. Friend of Wisdom of Crowds Jordan Castro practices the same subversive quotation to great effect in The Novelist.
But these writers were able to craft worlds that encompassed these banalities and exposed them as poor stand-ins for the richness of life. Jordan Castro’s Novelist utters many stupid things but he is always trying to be better than the stupid things he utters. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary has a head full of romantic, trite ideas, but her actual story is tragic and noble and true. At one point in her book, Levy writes: “These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.” I wish I could see more of that world; not just the scaffolding and the signage.
Still, Levy’s book has provided everything that a tired and busy reader could want on a day full of stress and drudgery: Crisp writing that is alive and that provides, here and there, a moment of ecstasy.
I would also contend that contemporary jargon gives a sense of time and place to literature. I find it jarring to read historical dramas that use modern phrases and social concepts out of context for the era. Yes, I have to work a bit to translate the words into modern conception but I appreciate being transported back to another time and circumstances.
As for the effect of the internet, one can only hope that there will come a reckoning of the banality of the banal.
I'll have to pick this up. I'm currently reading Franzen's Purity and people could make a similar case that precisely because of the story arc it only makes sense inside a certain cultural and social moment. But literature I guess is not there to simply transcend us but also to ground us, to stare us in the face and give us a moment of realisation no matter how fleeting it may be. It is in this way I have always found philosophy and literature to be intertwined.