‘My First Book’
By Honor Levy
Penguin Press, 224 pages

“My First Book” feels like a first book — not only for its author, Honor Levy, but also for her generation. Here is a dispatch from the internet indigenous, a primer to the online oversoul that is Gen Z’s birthright and homeland. It was Flaubert who told the novelist to prop a mirror up by the side of the road. Ms. Levy  has taken a selfie of the vapers, the posters, and the swipers. This book makes nearly everything else you’ll read this year feel like yesterday’s news. 

At a time when too much of contemporary memoir has become pasteurized — mothers in Greenpoint cooing over cradles and practicing pious politics — Ms. Levy offers a spikier, amped up report. She discloses that people’s real lives pulse under glass screens and that meaning is a meme. This book doesn’t care a whit about genre, that old seminar saw. It obsesses over how the web is changing our words, bubbling up its own species of vernacular.

Lest all this sound like “My First Book” was written by Chat GPT, rest assured that Ms. Levy’s voice is distinctive. Ms. Levy is also alive to the analog — that is to say, the body, which persists even as more of ourselves float onto the cloud. She clocks the “tan stomachs” of boys she smokes with on rooftops, the feel of friends’ fingers snaking down her throat, Adderall buzzing in the bloodstream, and the sinuous silhouettes of penthouse partygoers.

Ms. Levy is associated with the downtown Manhattan phenomenon known as “Dimes Square,” a so called “microneighborhood” nestled between Chinatown and the Lower East Side that came to be known three years ago as the locus for a spiky brand of reactionary politics, an interest in traditional Catholic aesthetics, and a resistance to Covid-19 strictures. They courted cancellation and were beautiful and based. 

These scenesters published their own zines, founded a pirated radio station, and can still be seen spilling onto sidewalks at watering holes like Le Dive and Dimes. While “My First Book” is not a Dimes Square travel guide, it imports its contrarian sensibility. Ms. Levy is unimpressed by identity politics and eschews trigger warnings. When she does too much cocaine, she recites her bat mitzvah reading. She has since converted to Catholicism.

Here is how the book begins: “He was giving her 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. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu … He’d launch a thousand ships for her. He’d do anything. She’d be his cat-girl gf, his tradwife, his love for life.”

The prose is pacey and maximalist. Those thousand ships sailed from Marlowe. Other turns of phrase — “he felt western civilization falling and bile rising in his throat, a microwaved McFlurry of remorse” — are culled from the contemporary. All creators crib, and Ms. Levy’s borrowings sing. She’d like to “go to Berlin , to dance with the boys at Berghain, to eat knafeh with Zoe, to see the Reichstag or whatever.” Who doesn’t?

Ms. Levy is especially perceptive on the online bildungsroman. She writes that on the same day she graduated high school the “‘Associated Press Stylebook’”  changed internet to be spelled with a little i. It belongs to us all, but it’s no longer a world to visit or a place to hide or explore.” She adds that the “algorithm is always learning, just like me and you when we were 11 and alone and absorbing it all so fast, so hungry, twirling around our rooms.”

“My First Book” is uneven. Chapters are marbled with repetition, and a section on online neologisms (“edgelord,” “ghost,” “cringe,” and the like) lacks the pulsing portraiture of the narrative and autobiographical chapters. Still, this is real writing, worth reading alongside another paper cut from the present’s bleeding edge — Caroline Calloway’s “Scammer.” They know each other, of course. Is it too early to announce that a new Lost Generation is being found?