“Flat Earth” is a coming-of-age novel about what happens when girlhood curdles into womanhood and the world itself seems to be collapsing in tandem. Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel, published Nov. 4, follows Avery, a 20-something graduate student living in New York. Avery is trying — and mostly failing — to write her dissertation while grappling with the artistic success of her effortlessly elegant best friend, Frances. Frances gets married, finishes her first film and returns to the city as the toast of the art world. Avery, meanwhile, takes a job at the conservative dating app Patriarchy and goes on dates with a rotating roster of older men who treat her like a lifestyle accessory.
Levy, a Colorado-born writer and founding editor of Forever Magazine, writes with the precision of someone who’s lived inside this world of a graduate student — balancing the precarious economy of art, youth and attention. “Flat Earth” is Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” for the Adderall generation, and as the book’s own blurb promises, Levy’s story delivers a fragmented, razor-edged and pulsing irony in light of this. Levy’s sentences hit like perfectly clipped thoughts — brisk and unsentimental. The novel is written in short bursts, filled with paragraphs separated by three asterisks and brief numbered breaks that feel like a cross between diary entries and social media posts. The fragmented structure doesn’t just look cool; it mirrors the way the mind splinters under constant stimuli, or how identity is built out of half-formed posts and unfinished thoughts.
That sense of irony is clearest when Avery narrates the world around her with a mix of exhaustion and bite. It’s the kind of observational humor that teeters between satire and truth. At one point, for instance, she says that:
“In a perfect world, the men would be really rich and the girls would be really pretty, but the economy had taken a nosedive, and they were prepared to settle for hyper-online incel-adjacent misogynists and young white women with low self esteem.”
It’s a line that feels tossed off, but it distills the book’s humor as well as its critique. Levy is skewering the dating landscape shaped by inequality, performance and online rot. This is the genius of “Flat Earth”: It is satire situated so close to reality you can hear your phone buzzing in the background.
Avery herself is one of those narrators you don’t necessarily like, but you recognize. Hyperaware, self-destructive and constantly using irony as a shield against genuine feeling, she embodies the kind of existential malaise that defines so much of Gen Z and millennial fiction. Levy’s prose is stylish and knowing — a little Ottessa Moshfegh, a little Sally Rooney — and her sense of humor saves the book from total despair.
Still, a hollowness creeps in as the novel goes on. Avery’s chaos feels real, but it never leads anywhere. It’s not real in a dramatic, plot-driven way, but in the way true stagnation feels. She keeps circling the same obsessions (Frances, her dissertation, the older men she dates) without ever moving toward anything. Levy hints at storylines that seem like they might erupt into change — Avery’s half-hearted attempts to return to her academic work, her uneasy dynamic with one of the men she dates, even the illusion that Frances’s success might force some kind of reckoning — but none of them quite crystallize. Instead, they dissolve back into the same low-grade hum of self-sabotage. It’s true to life, but the novel’s refusal to let any storyline fully develop leaves the reader wanting more shape than Levy offers. Avery writes later on that:
“The girls are upending all the progress our mothers made. … Soon there are aprons on view in every shop window in the city. I livestream myself trying to roast a chicken in my tenement apartment.”
It’s a perfect microcosm of the book’s worldview: a little funny, a little terrifying and maybe too cynical to care about fixing anything.
Levy’s debut is undeniably smart — addictive even. The book captures something eerily true about the moment we’re living in, where attention spans are at an all-time low, dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high and everyone is trying to brand their pain as intellectual. But like its narrator, “Flat Earth” sometimes mistakes insight for impact. The fragments are sharp, but the whole never quite coheres.
There is, however, still something resonant about Levy’s bleak, chic little novel. It doesn’t offer growth or redemption, it just recognizes it. In the end, “Flat Earth” feels less like a story and more like a mood: a knowing smirk at the end of the world.
Daily Arts Contributor Ava Emery can be reached at avaemery@umich.edu.
