Set in a post-‘vibe shift’ New York inhabited by edgy artists and aspiring trad wives, Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth is a strange and smart new addition to the canon of novels about young women coming undone in big cities.
Suspended in a state of stunted girlhood, Flat Earth’s protagonist, Avery, meanders her way through an avaricious downtown art world and a series of transactional relationships with rich men who hate her. A stimulant addict in a citywide Adderall shortage, Avery wants to be a writer but spends most of her time obsessively resenting her best friend, Frances, who has won success with a “really American” documentary about rustbelt conspiracy theorists. Eventually Avery finds a job at a right-wing dating app somewhat unsubtly called ‘Patriarchy’ and justifies her moral flailing by saying things like “commerce is mostly prostitution”.
Flat Earth evokes the same nihilistic post-feminism as two recent films about the commodification of youth and femininity in America: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and Celine Song’s Materialists. Though Flat Earth is significantly better than either, it shares a similar bleak depiction of youthfulness and beauty as the only sources of power women have.
Avery’s principal anxiety is that she knows these qualities are finite; in her late 20s she already feels them “collapsing like the British Pound”. Sometimes satire flies too close to the sun, and like both films, Flat Earth risks replicating the same conditions it critiques. Perhaps, Levy implies, this is always the case with art under patriarchy.
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“Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable? Like galleries,” Avery wonders, as her disaffected ennui begins to unravel, and cracks in her dead-eyed Stepford wife facade begin to appear. The ending of the novel is cruel – but so is reality, when beauty is currency and the need “to appear youthful and hydrated at the end of the world” is only to collaborate with those who hate us.
I read this book the same way I sometimes scroll through X late at night: quickly, compulsively and with an intense worry for the fate of the world which lingers long after I put down my phone. Flat Earth feels like having stared into the blue light too long – I imagine this is just what Levy intended.
