Flat Earth
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A young woman struggles with the artistic success of her more privileged, beautiful best friend in this ruthless portrait of the New York art scene in which relationships are transactional, men are vampiric, and women have limited time to trade on their youth, beauty, and talent—it’s Renata Adler’s Speedboat for the Adderall generation
"I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured; wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever.” —Leslie Jamison
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.
In this generational portrait, attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. Flat Earth is a story of coming of age in America, a novel about commodification, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that’s as sharp and sardonic as it is heartbreaking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levy debuts with a darkly funny work of hyperrealism about a broke New York City grad student on a self-destructive path as "right-wing nutrition fads fall into fashion" and the government moves to "legalize crime completely." Avery, 26, is having trouble making sense of it all, at least for the manuscript she plans to write for her media studies program, and instead joins her best friend, Frances, on a road trip. Frances, who hails from a wealthy North Carolina family, is making a documentary about conservative conspiracy theorists, and the two visit, among other destinations, a Flat Earth Convention in Texas. Upon their return to New York, Avery takes Frances's advice to have sex with billionaire men in exchange for her tuition, while Frances drops out to get married and move back home. As Levy outlines in interstitial chapters that read like news bulletins, women are increasingly relying on men as the economy crashes. Eventually, Avery begins working for Patriarchy, a dating app that caters to "incel-adjacent misogynists" and "young white women with low self-esteem," initially as a copy writer and later as a paid escort. Levy's pitch-perfect humor leavens the painful material, while her well-observed depiction of the women's friendship holds it all together. Even as its characters make unfulfilling bargains with themselves and others, the novel never loses the fierceness of its gaze. It's an astute and audacious satire.
