LUV OF GOD IS PUR3 WHEN JOY & 5UFFERING INSPIRE AN EQUAL DEGRE3 OF GRATITUDE: My First Book by Honor Levy – Manuel Marrero
September 23, 2024
What if Honor Levy wrote a book? My First Book answers. Not to be facile, a book is fossilized time, and the pandemic broke time to the extent that it feels like avid readers of Levy’s prolific online corpus were kept waiting too long for the book to materialize. With so much self-evident precocity and advance ballyhoo, backlash was bound to trail her. To be equal to the times, let “thespis,” or divine inspiration, take possession of your mind and body and live a little, be an enfant terrible, but you still need to publish a book, unbearably intimate and sharply revealing. Honor Levy is tapped in. To the epicenter of “tectonic-level linguistic changes” and more. I’ve heard her voice in the ether, we all have. It’s preoccupied with language in its holism. It’s almost flexy in its shameless saturation of the zeitgeist. In the first story, “Love Story,” she throws every desperate love trope out the window of a speeding car. The book shouts glyphs and slogans at you, copies and pastes and regurgitates information with anthemic nerve, annihilating the self, centering God as doing her part for the new Christian sincerity alt lit 2.0 nu temperance movement and “straight edge” reformation of social capitalist democracy. It’s a horseshoe coming full circle when she writes “I trust the algorithm just like I trust God. It’s all been written. There’s always a code to it. IRL or on the screen, it’s all intelligent design…There is no outside-of-online. Everything’s real.” Everything’s God. Deeply moralistic in its emphasis on apologetics and confessional; “Let me try harder. Let me think my most shameful thoughts. That’s all secrets are…Apologizing feels so right. We are all hurting. We are all hurting each other.” But really theological, ecumenical, spiritual- “I’m not a big believer in coincidence,” with an Eastern fixation on eternal recurrence, Mark Fisher, and Buddhist ideas: “we Gen Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in the playfulness of identity…we know that nothing is stable, especially not the self” comes across as the wryly terrifying war cry of cluster B aka divine retribution for our destruction of the family. A predilection for pregnancy without nurturing maternal instincts, a sexiness that is incidentally sapphic and ephebophilic, a soul crushing naïveté more high functioning than makes any sense, by turns. The Old Testament God of Abraham’s wrath figures heavily as a teleological conception of the apocalypse, which is always looming, and older gods of cornstalks preside over a more desolate vision. She continues, “Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out that it’s real, it’s even funnier.” This is irony-poisoning, the germ of a screen-sick generation. “It feels good to smile…rejecting the self.” This is how it feels to live today. “here I am here I am here I am” “the end of the self,” “l’appel du vide.” Insufferably tweaked and making no excuses for wanting to be adored, she begs the question, “I’m afraid we’re all already too afraid of being wrong,” damningly, of “being left in the rain.” No fool, “when boys are gentle I am always surprised.”
There’s a reflexive almost-imagism to how she makes intuitive leaps. My First Book is variously omniscient, wildly preternatural, schizo-clairvoyant and euphorically cringe, strikingly modern, the antidote to MFA slop as a fifth column, a Trojan horse for high BPM pivoting and pirouetting with whiplash from consecution giving Eschaton, slumber parties, fallen eyelashes and chewed cuticles. It is sex and death for an Eros-deficient population. This book contains sixteen of the very best stories written from 2020-now. In 2020 we were all in this liminal state of lockdown, forcibly atomized with weakened immune systems. As the last of our privacy was effectively abolished, grown men cried into my shoulder on multiple occasions. My fascination with the time period we are still in now, beginning in 2020, is perfectly encapsulated by My First Book. I’ve witnessed and experienced the world turning on multiple generations of young writers. I want to know how much psi Honor Levy has. The words iterate in my mind before I’ve read them. “It’s just for my grandma.” No kidding, me too. She does this thing where she limns a scene in a sweeping brushstroke like “Back home to her mom’s house, she crawls into an unmade bed, feral girl summer, mouse mode in her burrow, vermin instincts kicking in.” The last three fragments tell you what summer it is, which mode she’s in, and where this is going. Levy’s interviews may at first seem a cop-out, but let me frame control it for you, she’s not about to get in the way of her stories. It’s a lot more serious and important than she’s keen to reveal, how good she is. This is good. Would you even know what to do? Are you built for it? To be cut from the clouted cloth and do it all with a ludic sense of humor, mindful of the sometimes shocking grievousness of her stories? So she’s authentically batty, I’m not one to genuflect but so what? She’s not jockeying for status. Let me say unequivocally and full-throatedly they are wrong; inbred, cross-eyed and cornfed. “Rage seems to be the most important emotion of our time…if we can harness it, then maybe we can save ourselves.” Nothing escapes her. It is beautiful and ugly at the same time, like modernity. This is actually brat. It’s a scream. She won. Give it up. “the war is already lost so why go anywhere?” I love this book, breaks your heart into syllables, reenchants literature, imagines deep state actors as “sympathetic and emotionally supportive” federal agents who serve as guardian angels or chaperones on a night of bawdy revelry. A clot shot, a text-based adventure game. We could see the big one, the future. Fun, a little evil, and sad, Honor Levy shreds the keyboard after downloading your thoughts. I bought this book for my niece on her eighteenth birthday hoping to reverse engineer illiteracy.