Although the internet-driven “alt lit” scene that sprang up in the US in the 00s never really caught on in the UK – its best-known figure is Tao Lin (Taipei, Shoplifting from American Apparel) – it quickly accrued a certain kind of insurgent glamour, its unkempt aesthetic thrillingly indifferent to prim metrics of poetry and empathy. Many of the scene’s canonical titles – Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life?, Megan Boyle’s Liveblog – came courtesy of the taste-making US indie publisher Tyrant, whose founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano, died in 2021 just as he was about to publish a new breed of punky proteges, among them Sean Thor Conroe (Fuccboi), Gabriel Smith and Honor Levy, who caught DiTrapano’s eye – the story goes – when she tweeted that she was writing a book for him; she wasn’t.
Levy’s debut collection, My First Book, is the fruit of that chutzpah: a jittery sifting of post-Trump digital flotsam, crackling with Xanax-numbed shock value (“When I was 12 I watched beheadings before dinner”) and the casual bad-taste humour of an online shit-poster: someone here snorts so much amphetamine they “could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”, while more than one narrator refers to images of death camp prisoners as “thinspo”.
These aren’t stories so much as an attitude: Levy’s speakers wear their privilege tauntingly slack, which isn’t always unfunny (“When I grow up I’ll control the media or the banks, but first I’ll study comparative literature or new media or Nietzsche like my brother did at NYU”). Somehow, the hyper-adrenalised staccato and pitch-dark cynicism generates moments of real feeling: in Love Story – a sort of Zoomer On Chesil Beach counterpointing the thoughts of an unnamed guy and girl during a message-fuelled flirtation – we’re crushed when the male character ruthlessly “leaves her on read”, toying with her emotions (“Sorry for the late reply I was away from my keyboard”).
