Book review: Witty jab at smartphone era

Anika Jade Levy's 'Flat Earth' is very good at illustrating how very differently men and women experience the world

Anika Jade Levy creates a Holden Caulfield of her time in the book’s protagonist, Avery.

• Flat Earth 
• Anika Jade Levy 
• Abacus, €14.99

Gore Vidal  once said: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

This is the dilemma confronting Flat Earth’s protagonist, Avery. 

A vacillating twentysomething postgraduate literature student, Avery lives in the shadow of Frances — her prettier and more accomplished friend.

As Anika Jade Levy’s book opens, Frances is touring the febrile American interior making an artsy documentary.

Avery, for no particular reason, is tagging along, and watches with a mixture of envy and awe as Frances marches towards “the inevitability of her success”.

The focus of her documentary is the gruesome consequence of laissez-faire capitalism, and from this task she will not be deterred.

“A cluster of climate protesters were gathered in the park,” Avery notes, “but Frances wasn’t interested. She was looking for the real America.”

They find plenty, their quixotic tour culminating in a stop at the Flat Earth Conference in Dallas, where a woman tells them that Adolf Hitler discovered the Earth was flat, then faked his death and moved to Antarctica to build a new Berlin.

“She spoke with demented American enthusiasm,” Avery tells us, “a lilt in her voice that I associated with prescription stimulants.”

As Avery has predicted, her friend’s film becomes a much-talked about success, and Frances compounds this triumph by marrying a man from a midwestern ranching dynasty.

Avery, meanwhile, returns to New York to complete a postgraduate degree. Money is a constant problem, which she addresses in unwise ways.

“It was difficult to find a straightforward arrangement,” she explains, “a tolerable man who would pay me for sex. I told myself it was a matter of patience.”

Running on a gloomy cocktail of self-loathing and macro contempt, Avery wastes her time with older men and talks about being a writer, while writing nothing.

She operates as a kind of Holden Caulfield for her time: On the hunt for all things phoney, she finds herself surrounded with them.

Meanwhile, Frances is perhaps not as successful as she seems.

Late in the book, Avery considers “all of Frances’ achievements: Her marriage, her movie, her eating disorder, her suicide attempt ... She had packed a decade’s worth of life experience into a single year.”

We’re never entirely sure if Frances and Avery actually like each other.

They are bonded by a cripplingly self-conscious dysfunction. All their friends “perform poverty”.

At one point Avery tells us how a male pal had “cleaned up his act, and forgiven his parents for giving him a decent life”.

This book is very good at illustrating how very differently men and women experience the world. 

Levy has the good sense to name-check the writers she might be accused of plagiarising: JD Salinger, Mary Gaitskill, etc.

Charged with a gleeful apocalyptic energy, her narrative is written in a bitty, broken-up style that either reflects or panders to the smartphone attention span.

“It feels as if mass literacy was a mistake,” Avery decides. Elsewhere, an older lover berates her: “I bet you don’t know how to cook. You use your smartphone to summon a climate refugee to bring you tacos.”

Ruthlessly edited into a sharpened point, Flat Earth wittily articulates the dilemmas of affluent young American women raised on smartphones and taught that seeming to be happy and successful is far more important that what’s actually going on.

Beneath all the furious cleverness, it is hard to get a handle on who these characters really are, but that may be the point.

Levy’s book is a briskly enjoyable generational snapshot as, time and again, Avery hurts herself in order to prove she exists.