“I’m glad it’s a girl,” Daisy Buchanan says of her infant daughter in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
If Anika Jade Levy’s cynical debut novel is anything to go on, that same rule applies to American women precisely 100 years later. Levy’s own glittering satirical tale, Flat Earth, suggests today’s young women are presented with two life pathways: diligently endeavour to be brilliant but end up in chewy emotional turmoil, or choose not to care about anything too deeply, be foolish, and have a rollicking (albeit risk-laden) good time, Daisy Buchanan-style.
These parallel trajectories are embodied by Frances and Avery, two friends living in New York. Frances is ambitious, cool, cold. She endears herself to other people with “a sort of hardened, charismatic, middle-American misogyny”. Her “family has more money than they could spend in five lifetimes”. She spends a significant chunk of her time “readying herself for her destiny”, and for a little while goes out with strangers for money, although “only because she hoped she might get herself sex-murdered by one of these men so that the girls in our [college] department would mythologise her forever”.
On the other hand, Avery, our aimless narrator, is quietly resentful and frequently high. “I globbed sunscreen onto my face haphazardly as if I were my own petulant child,” she says. “I waited for a husband or for something to happen to me,” she laments, Daisy-like, twiddling her thumbs. She repeatedly tells of how the cracked glass screen of her phone makes her fingertips bleed and regularly finds herself contemplating deep questions such as: “Doesn’t one imagine that by the seventy-second virgin the Jihadist would tire of virgins. Like, another one?”
The pair are enrolled on the same postgraduate media studies course at a stylish campus where undergrads dress in Burberry plaid. (“When I was nineteen,” Avery whines, “I at least had the good sense to gesture at poverty.”) At the point that Flat Earth opens, Avery is tagging along on a tour round the country with Frances, who is on a mission to film an experimental documentary about “the real America”.
That “real America”, as it happens, is the best bit of this book, described by Levy with dense and gorgeously spiky prose. Rodeos, purity balls, Instagram romance coaches, synthetic opioids, Hyatt hotels, egg-freezing ads, conspiracy theories, Confederate flag bikinis, a Californian town called East Jesus, “9/11-themed slot machines” where “airplanes crashed into the twin towers and exploded every time you hit a triple” — it’s all jammed in there.
Feminism, in this corner of the world, is just a thing that used to be fashionable. Clouds are “bruised purple from pollution”. Most brilliantly, a church altar bears a sign that says: “NONFUNCTIONING ALCOHOLICS ARE NOT PERMITTED TO TAKE PART IN THE COMMUNION.”
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Avery’s moment of hamartia comes after Frances drops out of college, moves back home to North Carolina, and merrily gets married to a labourer called Forrest. Alone, low on cash and looking for something (anything) to do, she gets a job at a far-right dating app called Patriarchy, designed for “men who want uncooked organ meat, sports gambling enthusiasts” and “downwardly mobile white men in red states”. The bosses say what she’s doing is publicity and marketing. Really, it’s swiping and going on dates with these beasts.
Flat Earth is a deliciously accurate description of how life looks at 26-and-a-half (including “experience accumulating in the form of minor and mostly voluntary humiliations” and how “my breasts were beginning to sag, but I still slept with my stuffed animals”). The novel is light on plot and heavy on vibes, but fortunately those vibes are meaty, juicy and tantalisingly zeitgeisty. Expect to see it in the manicured hands of cool girls — our own century’s beautiful little fools — very soon.
Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy (Abacus £14.99 pp224). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members