There is a long tradition of stories about artists that are also about the question of how to represent life in art; novels about artists with toxic female friendships are more unusual.
Enter Anika Jade Levy’s slim and sharp debut Flat Earth, which shares its title with a film made by a woman whom Avery, the narrator, identifies as her best friend. Frances is a rich and beautiful twentysomething who becomes a “reluctant celebrity in certain circles” after her film, “an experimental documentary about rural isolation and rightwing conspiracy theories” in the modern-day United States, premieres to critical acclaim at a gallery in New York. Avery, meanwhile, is struggling to write what she describes as “a book of cultural reports”.
Frances’s success isn’t easy for Avery. The two women met as undergraduates, but Avery hasn’t got family money. She maxes out her credit card and does occasional escort work to meet tuition payments. What makes her most resentful, though, is that Frances has dropped out of grad school to get married. Back in New York, panicked about her prospects, Avery goes out with a string of men – none significant enough to be referred to by their actual names – and ends up taking a job at a rightwing dating app called Patriarchy.
While this is Levy’s first book, she has made a name for herself – in certain circles – as a founding editor of Forever Magazine, a trendy publication for alternative literature and arts. “A big thing,” Levy has said when describing its editorial preferences, “is style over plot. We really care about language.” This approach is reflected in Flat Earth – and some passages from the book are edited versions of stories that Levy wrote for the magazine. The prose is, for the most part, simple and precise, punctuated with bursts of imagery (“I fluttered around the windowless room like a pigeon in an airport”) as well as short extracts from what appear to be Avery’s cultural reports, which read almost like poems – strange visions of an apocalyptic present or near future.
It’s true, too, that there is not much in the way of narrative here. Levy sneaks in a joke about this, with Avery admitting that “when I did manage to write there was no plot, just prose. I told myself this was because I was a socialist or something, uninterested in the commercial potential of books.” There’s a wedding, a funeral, gallery openings and other events – but really these are occasions for Levy to describe the world that her characters move in.
The book is itself, in a sense, a cultural report. Sometimes it gets a little too hyperspecific, as in the satirical depictions of New York’s downtown arts scene. But the bigger picture – late-stage capitalism segueing into techno-feudalism, eco-pessimism, a moral arc of the universe that seems to bend not towards justice but away from it – is bleakly relevant to all of us.
Perhaps the most vivid aspect is how thoroughly Avery has absorbed the worst values of the contemporary moment, especially in the way she sees herself and Frances as competing objects of sexual commerce. She has no time for feminism, which she notes is no longer fashionable. “It comes as a relief when our romantic relationships reconfigure around regressive ideas about gender,” she writes in one of her reports. She takes tips from an online life coach on how to behave as femininely as possible so that men will want to look after her. She is terrified of ageing. At one stage, she wears a cow-print outfit to a party “to signal fertility”.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Avery is, of course, miserable – cynical participation in a rigged system can only get you so far. Flat Earth is not, unsurprisingly, a joyful book. But somewhere in all the irony we might find a glimmer of hope: the hint from Levy that there might be other ways to see the world, which our narrator has not discovered. A therapist, for instance, suggests that she work to “cultivate an inner life”. Avery may feel as though her youth is already dwindling, but she’s only in her 20s. There’s still time for her to grow up.
• Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy is published by Abacus (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
