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<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m glad it\u2019s a girl,\u201d Daisy Buchanan says of her infant daughter in F Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby. \u201cAnd I hope she\u2019ll be a fool \u2014 that\u2019s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Anika Jade Levy\u2019s cynical debut novel is anything to go on, that same rule applies to American women precisely 100 years later. Levy\u2019s own glittering satirical tale, Flat Earth, suggests today\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
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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 \u201ca sort of hardened, charismatic, middle-American misogyny\u201d. Her \u201cfamily has more money than they could spend in five lifetimes\u201d. She spends a significant chunk of her time \u201creadying herself for her destiny\u201d, and for a little while goes out with strangers for money, although \u201conly 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\u201d. <\/p>\n
On the other hand, Avery, our aimless narrator, is quietly resentful and frequently high. \u201cI globbed sunscreen onto my face haphazardly as if I were my own petulant child,\u201d she says. \u201cI waited for a husband or for something to happen to me,\u201d 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: \u201cDoesn\u2019t one imagine that by the seventy-second virgin the Jihadist would tire of virgins. Like, another one?\u201d<\/p>\n
The pair are enrolled on the same postgraduate media studies course at a stylish campus where undergrads dress in Burberry plaid. (\u201cWhen I was nineteen,\u201d Avery whines, \u201cI at least had the good sense to gesture at poverty.\u201d) 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 \u201cthe real America\u201d. <\/p>\n
That \u201creal America\u201d, 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, \u201c9\/11-themed slot machines\u201d where \u201cairplanes crashed into the twin towers and exploded every time you hit a triple\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s all jammed in there. <\/p>\n
Feminism, in this corner of the world, is just a thing that used to be fashionable. Clouds are \u201cbruised purple from pollution\u201d. Most brilliantly, a church altar bears a sign that says: \u201cNONFUNCTIONING ALCOHOLICS ARE NOT PERMITTED TO TAKE PART IN THE COMMUNION.\u201d <\/p>\n