The Internet Infection

The viscerally negative reaction (one Tweet got upwards of 1.3 million views) of The DiscourseTM to Honor Levy's My First Book, or rather, more importantly to Honor Levy's recent profile in The Cut, is enough to make the reviewer a partisan: a defender of the right of any serious author, including Levy, to be criticized for their work, and not their character (or perceptions, rumors, or machinations about who and what they might be). The behavior of a banal, envious mob of semi-intellectuals (over-produced humanities elites jockeying for the last traces of financial and moral support left inside a dying cultural system) online is a perversion of intelligent culture, and a sign that books are almost nothing more than tokens to be inserted into the giant-digital-talking-machine.

So, in light of the profound stupidity of the reaction to Levy’s book (by people who hadn’t read it because it hadn’t come out and they all couldn’t have had access to galleys) let me make a few things clear about book reviewing and book culture and book discourse (let me present a brief prolegomenon to the review itself…):

• A book and an author aren't good because envious, unambitious, derivative Internet commenters don't like it.
• A book isn't bad, conversely, if good writers or critics, or at least smart critics, decide to try to destroy it.
• A book may be bad because dumb people hate it, a book may be good because smart people like it, and because dumb people like it. But if any of those outcomes happen, it's actually just coincidence.
• Works of literature exist, ultimately, independent of the judgements of the present; critics can, at best, speed up the rate at which something lives or dies, but they can’t make a book live or die.
• In the long, long, long, long run, a work of literature is either one of two things: a pure product of its historical circumstances, useful only to historians and anthropologists; or radiant and transcendent: something that creates the future and creates the past; and, as a work of imagination, provokes the reader to value and experience the world in radically new ways, fertilizing the reader and breeding new forms of life.
• Those ultimately are the stakes of being an author, whether we want to admit them or not.
• What doesn't matter is what an author says on podcasts, or what an author says on social media, or the gossip that circulates behind an author's back, so to speak, or in front of their back, so to speak, or what's inferred, or their socioeconomic status, or where they grew up, or who their friends are. All of that is bullshit and doesn't matter.
• We don't know who Aeschylus hung out with, or what he said on a Thursday night in the Athenian forum; and we don't know what kind of ribald, politically incorrect jokes Marlow and Shakespeare made before Marlow got a knife in the eye in Deptford Tavern. No, we don't know, and it doesn't matter. We don't know if Milton secretly preferred the devil to God, and we don't know if Nabokov masturbated to Lolita as he was composing it.
• It doesn’t matter if the book got a small deal or big deal or no deal; it doesn’t matter if we did or didn’t. Deal gossip is fun, sure; it’s not literary criticism. It’s a petite bourgeoisie party trick.
• The fact is, we, consumers of discourse and readers of books, don't really know what Honor Levy believes, because we aren't Honor Levy, because we haven't lived our lives being Honor Levy, and we shouldn't want or need to know because we aren't babies.
• Thus, we (people old enough to read and write, and think about literature and culture and the meaning of life et al), don't need to lust after scurrilous and pointless gossip and social assassination, all the while pretending to do literary criticism. We should not pretend that we hold the power of life or death over a book, good or bad, in our opinion. We shouldn’t pretend that we could write better books–even if we can or have. We should just talk about what exists between the covers and try to learn from that.
• Let's think about the form, the style. Let's think about the words and the order they appear in. Let's think about how ideas leak out of the words and the form, how ideas double back and proliferate and turn against themselves (like soldiers in a melee who have lost track of what standard they're fighting for and under).

With that said… My First Book, is, in the opinion of the present reviewer, an uneven “book” of short stories (that might not actually be a book of short stories, but a series of interconnected, semi-fictionalized essays with moments of genuine originality, stylistic panache, and psychological insight). It might be more accurate to say that My First Book is actually the first internet book, the first work of fiction, that's totally naturalized to internet culture, totally naturalized to the computer, and to the way people talk inside computers, so to speak (and the title and formatting of the text points towards an evasion of genre, of the story qua story). 

And as such, it's interesting, because language works in new ways inside these fictional assemblages–or whatever they are, whatever you want to call them. And it's interesting because language also works in old ways, dead ways; Levy accumulates cliches and shitposting tropes; the book is a reproduction, synthesis of Internet speak, of the chatter of the scroll: a kind of form for the schizoid collective consciousness. (I think this is why screenshots of My First Book went viral in early May 2024: because the book is made of the Internet; the vitriol–the scoffing sense that ‘oh this can’t be literature’–was a weird kind of inflammatory response, like when a body rejects a donated organ. The Internet found the first categorically Internet book bad, or wanted it to be.)

Why My First Book matters, even if it doesn’t succeed in the long run–as almost every book ever written hasn’t–is because the form and content work together, however uneasily, to stimulate a discourse-besotted brain; in short, formally, stylistically, literally, it makes you think about the way you’ve been thinking (I’m thinking in particular of “Cancel Me” and “Z was for Zoomer”). And I think this marks aesthetic merit: this bricolage of tropes and contemporary psychological archetypes is composed in such a way that it’s impossible to return unconsciously to the infinite scroll. My First Book is infected with the Internet because we’re infected with the Internet. The quarter-formed, barely formed, vestigial, characters (Gideon and Ivan and Jack and Roger and Internet Girl and Ottilie and so on) who populate the book, like so many Zoomer Malloys and Malones, while they lack interiority, depth, and interest, are surfaces in which we can see ourselves–mirrors for flattened souls.

Levy might be annoying, might court cringe, and definitely leans too heavily on anaphora–like almost all Tyrant Books derived alt-lit (which is a product of readings where repetition helps the audience follow along)–it knows more about its subject material than its reader; it reflects on the Internet more deftly and deeply than the average anon, and demonstrates an intuitive understanding of how the digital mass psyche operates. My First Book acknowledges that the very form of the book is under incredible pressure; if My First Book has many features of a shitty book, it's because Levy knows that books and culture and people are generally shitty now. It’s daring to internalize this anxiety rather than desperately build aestheticized walls to keep it out.

A recent, and I think very astute review by Greta Rainbow suggests that Levy is a great poster but a derivative and tired fiction writer; this is almost right. Levy is a commendable writer because she is a great poster; she understands that the literature and posting are converging; the role of author–above the fray, armed with MFA and technique and style–is just as much a convention, a performance, as Twitter anon or Tumblr girlie or meme-lord.

I have no idea if My First Book will be read by anyone in six months or a year, let alone ten or a hundred or a thousand; but I’m glad to have read it now. It has its immaturities, and betrays a sometimes hasty composition; it’s uneven, but it has moments of genius (evidenced on the first page of the first story, “Love Story”).

What may hold it back, however, is simply this: soon almost none of the allusions in the book will matter to anyone; the text is pegged to a culture without roots. The gambit of My First Book, therefore, is this: it wants to be interesting long after its subject has washed away. I wish it luck.

Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.