Buzzy ... Levy's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z, the first generation to completely be born after the existence of the internet ... Readers won't find meticulously plotted story arcs, fleshed-out characters, emotional epiphanies, or any other earmarks of conventional literary fiction. Most of Levy's stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet ... As the collection progresses, the unique blend of the satirical and the poignant gives way to a more essayistic approach to storytelling ... he milieu of Honor Levy's fiction is undeniably white and privileged, but her best stories exaggerate that milieu to great satirical effect. Perhaps her second book will contain more of them.
We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in My First Book, a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan ... She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she was encouraged to publish My First Book too soon. The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones, a few of which I suspect were typed on a MacBook a long time ago ... In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort.
For Levy, narration is an interdimensional road map, winding through space and time, combining as signposts her two decades of encyclopedic meme knowledge interspersed with curveball references to antiquity ... Levy writes in her own referential language, a lightspeed style that must be post-post-post modern ... Always self-conscious.
Levy delivers a finely crafted package of what it’s like being a zoomer ... Short stories that are structurally playful and cheekily droll ... Perhaps one of the most surprising and refreshing takes is Levy’s own daring and pointed critique of society. It’s an unexpected note, neither sour nor sweet, but thorny and declarative ... I want to emphasize that Levy is a clever and funny writer ... Cunning.
Most of the stories in My First Book are like this: Light on plot and internal narratives. Instead, what we get from Levy’s characters is voice and energy ... As her stories progress, Levy makes a point to peel back a little bit of the superficial edginess to reveal some of her characters’ human core ... Levy’s prose is sharp and smart, but upon finishing her debut collection, it’s hard to shake the feeling that its content was created to fit Levy’s brand rather than the other way around ... Flaws and all, it’s an undisputable arrival of a truly talented stylist, even if she does wear her influences plainly on her sleeve. Yet, aside from the occasional cutting, compulsively Tweetable turns of phrase, there aren’t any particular new ideas or voices here.
