Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The 'white-paper' she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel. Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances's triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.
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.
