‘My First Book’ Review

These are not great times for anyone trying to become a young debut author. People are reading less, and the publishing industry as a whole is chasing trends and political relevance over aesthetics and prose. So the recent release of My First Book by Honor Levy begs a lot of questions, if only just because of how widely covered it is. The Cut published a lengthy, fawning interview with the 26-year-old author shortly after The New York Times reviewed My First Book. Less formal circles of the Internet have attacked the book for its absurd use of overly online language, and is receiving mostly positive coverage from mainstream publications like the Guardian and NPR. But why is anyone even talking about it at all?

 Ironically enough, the sheer obscurity of Honor Levy is an effective parallel theme to the content of many of her stories, which tend to involve the narrator sometimes literally and other times not so literally pulling information from the Internet basically at random. Despite her recent Internet fame and somewhat less recent literary fame, Honor Levy still doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. So the piece from The Cut remains the main authoritative piece of information about who Honor Levy even is.

None of this, you might have noticed with increasing impatience, is any help at all to understanding what My First Book is actually about. Which you have to understand, is part of the point. The title itself is bewildering, making it obnoxiously difficult to discuss the book in casual conversation without it devolving into a Who’s On First routine. I wouldn’t normally namedrop a reference like this, but this is what young, overly online people do.

Not that I’m really all that young anymore. Or even all that online. Honor Levy herself, incidentally, acknowledges that she could be either a millennial or a zoomer in…one of these stories somewhere, I only have a hardcover copy so no ctrl+f easy searches for me. Although even bearing that in mind, most of the references she namedrops predate her birth. We, or she (or they? Pronouns are so confusing) only knows about them from memes anyway.

The longest story, at 56 pages, Z Was for Zoomer, isn’t really a story so much as it is an index of various memetic terms. In what I can only assume was a deliberate attempt to trigger my OCD, Z Was for Zoomer appears to just have one entry for every letter of the alphabet, but G and T get two entries apiece. This probably wasn’t actually an attempt to trigger my OCD. I’m just being melodramatic, because of how online I am.

My First Book by Honor Levy is kind of like that clip from The Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson talks about how his main strategy for breaking strikes these days is telling long-winded stories that don’t go anywhere, such as the one about why he used to carry an onion on his belt. It’s absurd nonsense. Does something being absurd nonsense qualify as being funny due to the content of the nonsense, or the way it layers irony, laundering references that might or might not make any sense if the reader has any idea what the text is actually talking about?

 Honor Levy’s stories have this bad habit of ending abruptly having never really ended, or started, with anything you could call a thesis statement, hitting the sour (or sweet?) spot of simultaneous under and overexplanation. So you might like My First Book if you liked this review. Maybe.