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The irregular review of reviews, vol. VI

Honor Levy: Dimes for your thoughts

This NYT review, by Dwight Garner, of My First Book by Honor Levy, set a lot of people squawking about the fact that, based on the extract Garner selected, Levy appears to be a grossly over-hyped writer:

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

A lot of people couldn’t see that this is actually quite good writing. The usual reasons prevail. Some people won’t recognise anything outside of the familiar as good. But, more importantly, I think, is the fact that this draws heavily on a particular sort of internet talk. Some of these sentences just won’t mean anything to some readers: even if they can track them literally, or work it out, their implied meaning won’t really be apparent. It is dense with allusions to a culture you may never have experienced.

Writers have been doing this for a long time, of course, think of Vile Bodies or the work of Ronald Firbank. The difference, apart from the fact that internet-speak is far more nuanced and varied than Edwardian slang, and that it has many more implications, is that everything is said with some level of irony. If you miss the irony then the whole thing surely would become unbearable.

There’s a line in Normal People that could stand motto for a whole swathe of writing in this mode: “She tried to roll her eyes at herself but it felt ugly and self-pitying rather than funny.” If you ironise everything all the time you end up being twee, shallow, glib, and gross. That’s more or less what I think happened with Molly, the memoir by Blake Butler that also divided people like partisan politics: what Butler and his wife Molly Brodak called irony a lot of other people called thin cover for openly disgusting behaviour. (Here’s my review of Molly; here’s Dwight Garner’s review.) So much of the disagreement about that book comes down to how seriously you take Butler and Brodak’s claims to irony; the same is true of Lauren Oyler.

It simply isn’t clear, a lot of the time, whether modern intellectuals and writers are really the good stuff or just a counterfeit. We live in ersatz times. Once the suspicion is raised, the writer is often dismissed, and always has the defence that the philistines don’t understand their layers of irony.

The other thing that makes people hate that Levy passage is Levy herself. There’s nothing new in the widespread disdain for a young novelist, especially a privileged young woman novelist one of whose friends wrote this about her in a national magazine:

Levy is rarely boring. She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.” Sometimes, it just sounds like Adderall-inflected slam poetry: “I make the algorithm, the algorithm makes me.” She calls this her “yap mode.”

For sure, Levy is giving Bloomsbury Lite here and not much else. Levy was a member of the Dimes Square literary scene, a group of people who produced their own literary newspaper The Drunken Canal. They got some attention in 2020-2022, and seemed to think of themselves as a counter-cultural movement. So the reaction against Levy’s book is, partly, as if to say, “Oh, so you’re not Hemingway in Paris after all?” Well, maybe, but let’s note that we don’t know what they’ve got in their drafts, and that just because they are rich-kids doesn’t mean they can’t write good fiction. Now that Levy has left the scene, we don’t know what she might produce.

(Another confusion in this debate is the question of canonical standards. One way of re-framing Garner’s review is that he said, “She’s not a genius, she’s just a very talented rich kid”, to which many people responded by ignoring the words “very talented”.)

What really makes it seem like Dimes Square isn’t, and wasn’t, any sort of literary movement, is that they are most concerned with what’s called the discourse, as this NYT profile makes clear, even if it doesn’t explicitly state so. The discourse is whatever everyone is talking about. But, discourse is also the limits of those conversations: discourse is the terms to describe the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable to say. Discourse is what we talk about when we talk about x. Whenever a topic becomes big enough that it seems like half the internet is talking about it, you will always see that certain ideas are the ones that get the attention; other perspectives and opinions are “outside of the discourse”. Often this is because you aren’t supposed to break ranks with the other people of your ideological group. Say the wrong thing, and you’re outré.

Levy’s book is part of a new type of writing that I have come to think of as “discourse fiction”. In discourse fiction, the limits of what the writing will say—and often, how it will say it—are set by the (mostly) online discourse the writer belongs to/identifies with. Many of these writers are (lightly) ironic but that either reads shallowly or dead pan to many audiences who don’t know much about the discourse being writing in/referred to.

Much of it, as with the alt lit movement, reads like a continuation of Twitter by other means, and so, even if it has technically impressive aspects, as with the para quoted from Levy above, is recoiled from for that reason. That can also give it its power, but with the supposed decline of the importance of individual creativity (c.f. Kenneth Goldsmith, Marjorie Perloff) this “memeification of language” (as Lauren Oyler has it) looks much more like “art” to some readers than to others. Writers like Oyler have tried to write internet novels that go against this, but which mostly succeed in writing in another form of discourse altogether.

When fiction reads like an op-ed / Twitter feed / TikTok meme transposed into an authorial voice and is presented as a high level of social commentary / novel of ideas / essayistic intervention / ironising of the op-ed / Twitter feed / TikTok meme, then a culture clash with some readers inevitably ensues. Because, they say, that just isn’t fiction. Obviously the long-reach of auto-fiction can be felt here, as can the reductionism of much of the philosophical and political education of modern literary students. This is what too much literary theory and not enough “real” philosophy will get you!

Whether or not any of this writing is autofiction, it is all too easy to think it might be, so any “mood affiliation” people have with, e.g. GenZ, will simply transfer to the assessment of the writing. Don’t like their tweets? Then you really won’t like their short stories! Can’t stand Lauren Oyler online? Wait till you read her essay collection!

Some writers are extremely good at talking about all of this within the bounds of a traditional novel, that is, by observing and recording it all, rather than merely enacting it. The extent to which people are able to talk about the world because they find it interesting, rather than being trapped in an online discourse bubble, is a major (underappreciated) theme of Sally Rooney’s work. Think not just of Beautiful World but also scenes like the one in Normal People when Connell’s emails are said to be better written than his short stories. Rooney is always finding moments when her characters can be outside, or resistant to, the accepted discourse of their peers, on or off line. Brandon Taylor is good at this too.

The roots of all of this can be traced back through Conversations with Friends into the alt lit movement and, ultimately, to the late 1990s, Kenneth Goldsmith, and the decline of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The fact that books lost their dominant cultural position meant that the idea of a single author of original genius—the person who created the book—also lost their dominant cultural position. The author thus becomes less of a creator and more of a compiler, less Romantic genius more scholastic monk: the aim is not to be yourself, but to select, sample, rearrange, reorder.

So, discourse in fiction is the heart of the dispute about Levy. As was pointed out on Twitter by @moonandmouth, Dwight Garner did not know what a haplogroup was (neither did I). To those, like Levy, who are very online in a particular kind of way, these terms are familiar, boringly so. To someone like Garner, it is a fresh new way of using language precisely because he is outside Levy’s discourse.

There are many subtleties to how this works, and it is far too simple to say that the author is finally dead, but this is the essence of what’s happening in the Levy debate. It’s not that people dislike her writing, as such, but that they dislike the terms of her discourse. They didn’t expect, in reading fiction, to stumble into a corner of the internet that they dislike.