If Honor Levy isn’t exactly a feminist, then her writing has always betrayed an interest in unequal social relations between men and women. Take her story “Good Boys,” which was originally published on The New Yorker’s website in the summer of 2020, when Levy was a senior in college. The protagonist is a young woman hanging out on a rooftop in Paris with four boys who are in the midst of a study-abroad romp through Europe. She is a keen, silent observer of them: their hair, tanned stomachs, the way they call certain girls “dogs.” She instinctively understands what the boys mean by this: “They don’t mean bitches. They just mean dogs.” Most of the story ruminates on the taxonomic difference between a girl and a dog—or a girl who gets to hang with boys on a roof in Paris, and one who doesn’t.
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