Funny and sharp, but a bit underrealized ... Threads that are introduced with an air of significance disappear unresolved ... Still, the book effectively portrays the psychology of young women who are chronically online ... There is a layer of sadness under the flat surface, not quite accessible. This tension is ultimately where the novel succeeds in being beautiful. Levy is good at keeping the feeling out of reach.
This is a book that takes place upon the flat earth...a world of flat, dull characters who do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing for each other but a mild and mutual disdain ... Virtually every conversation in the book is borrowed from a familiar word bank of half-remembered Twitter theories ... The novel emerges from its hazy, nightmare repetition ... A provocative commentary on an artistic field reduced to its most superficial and craven impulses ... Each character in this book is so profoundly indifferent to every other that it is at times unclear why the reader should feel any different ... Her eye on...cold calculations can be truly inventive ... At other times, though, the narrator falls into more tired recitations that seem more curated for the market than in criticism of it ... Perhaps this is all a joke—but does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques? ... The novel sits uneasily, constraining itself from strong emotion in either direction, flattening out, instead, into an object of mostly sociological interest ... When art is reduced to mass marketing and pseudo-political recrimination, prose is pointless. Levy is to be lauded for her attempts to show this state of affairs; but it is to be lamented that she falls into it.
At its best when it shows us the widening gulf between those who watch horses give birth or wear Confederate-flag bikinis and those who attend gallery openings or fuck rich guys to finance their media-studies degrees. The novel can be wonderfully astringent, never more so than when Avery is steeped in industrial-strength anomie ... All I really want from a book. It’s teeming with rough sex and stimulants. But I did tire of its endless party reportage, and I wish the prose matched Avery’s messiness.
The novel includes some heavy-handed moments ... But there are more subtle scenes that speak to the weirdness of American life ... By far the best parts of Flat Earth are the deeply cynical interludes between chapters ... Avery does seem allergic to trying hard, to taking herself seriously, to opening herself up to the possibility of failure. In the end, this tension might be the best way to understand Flat Earth: It recognizes the twin desires to say something meaningful and to do it without appearing to try. The tricky reality is that, now as ever, the true artist can’t have it both ways.
Cynical ... [A] glittering satirical tale ... Dense and gorgeously spiky prose ... The novel is light on plot and heavy on vibes, but fortunately those vibes are meaty, juicy and tantalisingly zeitgeisty.
Uncanny and blunt, Levy’s first novel delivers a bleak, commodified reality—one that feels distant but recognizable—where everything has a price and little value ... Despite its unsettling portrayals of depravity, Levy’s prose is rich in style and sharp with punch lines ... Both a mirror and crystal ball, Flat Earth is for readers not afraid of looking deeply into society’s ills and perhaps finding parts of themselves there.
