Review of Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy

This is how I imagine Jonathan Franzen would write if he were a woman. Flat Earth is everything I loathe about literary fiction, pretentious to the point of parody (but it is definitely not that). I should have known this when I picked it up in a small bookstore on a trip to Montreal, but it was so slim and beguiling—a perfect book to read on my flights home—and the description really did get me. Alas, Anika Jade Levy fully embraces the style and conceits of literary fiction that I most abhor. So buckle up, because I drank a cup full of hater-ade, and I am ready to party.

Avery is in grad school, ostensibly to become a writer, though as she observes, she seldom actually writes much. She is low-key obsessed with her friend Frances, who is much richer than her and effortlessly successful as a result. Frances (the name might be an allusion?) shoots a Hillbilly Elegy–style documentary about the decadent ignorance of rural America. Avery, meanwhile, subsists on middle-class sex work and affairs with older men who don’t treat her well.

It feels like Levy wants to do this edgy self-critical thing where she says, “See, see how silly middle-class white women are in this day and age?” Simultaneously she’s doing the “we are living in the last days of empire” song and dance, pointing out the corruption and gooey reactionary centre of America. And you know what? If the writing style were different, I would fuck with this novel. That’s why the cover copy reeled me in: I actually love the premise here. Avery’s obsession with Frances was giving Idol, by Louise O’Neill, and the idea that Avery goes to work for a right-wing dating app called Patriarchy made me hope we’d get a trenchant exploration of tradwife trends in Gen Z white women.

Alas, instead we get staccato prose in a series of barely-a-paragraph vignettes where, yes, nary a quotation mark can be observed. I always feel like I am coated in something slick and gross after reading a book like this.

Avery is not a likeable character—none of the characters is—nor do I suppose she is meant to be this way. The voice Levy gives her is just so effortlessly cynical, not in a Holden Caulfield kind of way but in a very detached, not even really a part of the world kind of way. I really hate protagonists and storylines like this, for I feel like as readers we are left with very little to grasp onto. Who should I care about in this story?

The answer, of course, is we’re supposed to feel sorry for both Avery and Frances and take pity on them for being squeezed into the moulds that patriarchy and capitalism have encased them in. Gosh, how could we possibly feel bad for them? They’re just girls. In this economy!

“Women and girls are exploited and moulded by patriarchy” is not a super new observation, however. Nothing about this story feels fresh or new or radical in any way; it is a perfectly manicured piece of commercial fiction. Of all the characters in this story, the one that most seems to act as an author avatar is the law professor whom Avery sleeps with semiregularly. Not only does he claim a novel he wrote in his youth popularized the trend of eschewing quotation marks (hah), but he also claims to be a recovering Marxist. Now, he’s grizzled and grey and washed up and resigned to live under capitalism, not because he believes in it but because he no longer believes it can be replaced.

And hey, that’s fair, I guess. Feed me you tiny two-hundred page story dripping with cynicism and emptiness.

Just don’t be surprised when I throw it up all over your brand-new pair of heels because there’s nothing in this meal for me to digest.