John Pistelli on Debuts from Honor Levy and Madeline Cash

Putting the 'It' in 'It Girl'

This essay will appear in Issue 6 (the Fiction Issue) of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here. Join the MRB/Lil Skribblers chat room here.

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My First Book

by Honor Levy

Penguin, 212 pp., $27.00

Earth Angel

by Madeline Cash

CLASH Books, 152 pp., $14.20

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In May, Brock Colyar’s profile of Honor Levy appeared in The Cut to advertise her debut collection, My First Book. The ever-fractious online world that is both Levy’s literary subject and her fictional setting predictably reacted with resentment, disdain, and dismissal. Here, they said, was another privileged “literary it girl” pumped by publishers and publicists into the discourse, probably without the talent to back up the hype, if circulating excerpts of her extremely-online fiction, written in a flurry of dated meme-speak, were anything to go by:

It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his. 

Colyar’s article—and a subsequent spate of profiles and interviews in Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Bustle, Hobart, and more—portray a 26-year-old author poised from her college days to speak as the voice of her generation: a Bennington College wunderkind in the lineage of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, the last discovery made by the late editor Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books fame, a one-time provocation-spouting and podcasting fixture of New York’s reactionary Dimes Square scene. This hyper-reflexive Zoomer motormouth with a Notes app tattoo on her forearm, this writer who seems like she can only speak in the same attention-deficit digital argot in which she writes her fiction—can she really be our next major author? Or, if that’s too grandiose, can My First Book, self-consciously precocious title and all, at least be a good book?