\n<\/p>\n
Some people draw an easy, maybe even lazy, distinction between two generations: Gen Z performs coolness and irony, while Millennials are the cohort of political correctness and cringe. Gen Z wears low-rise jeans while Millennials post things such as \u201cYou can pry these high-rise pants from my cold, dead hands!\u201d These theories might make for a fun 30-second TikTok, but they have become so commonplace as to be almost meaningless. As I read Anika Jade Levy\u2019s debut novel, Flat Earth<\/em>, I wondered if it might actually say something new, not just about what it means to be a member of Gen Z, but about what it feels like to come of age as an artist\u2014and a person\u2014in this particularly vexed American moment.<\/p>\n Flat Earth<\/em> opens with an Adderall shortage in New York City, a consequence of supply-chain breakdowns and worsening relations with China. Without stimulants, 26-year-old Avery, a graduate student in a media-studies program, is unable to write. She\u2019s supposed to be working on \u201ca book of cultural reports, but it wasn\u2019t taking shape.\u201d Instead, she heads off on a summer trip with her best friend, Frances, another grad student, who\u2019s making a documentary about \u201crural isolation and right-wing conspiracy theories.\u201d The two friends take a road trip together, driving from the Georgia Guidestones to a flat-Earth conference in Dallas. Frances interviews people and Avery films handheld footage, neglecting her own work. \u201cI must have known, even then,\u201d Avery thinks, \u201cthat Frances\u2019s project was more important than mine. I envied her clarity of vision, the inevitability of her success. I would have followed her anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Flat Earth<\/em> seems to both share and sneer at Frances\u2019s desire \u201cto make something really American\u201d (the book and Frances\u2019s film share a title). The novel satirizes contemporary society and its discontents, indexing the internet\u2019s alienating effects, the rightward political swing of many young men (and women), and the absurdities of the New York City art scene. But Avery\u2019s complicated reflections on Frances\u2019s work are about more than the state of the nation: Her floundering attempts to write, and her intense jealousy of her friend\u2019s easy success, point to a deeper truth about the precarity of making art today.<\/p>\n Humming in the background of Levy\u2019s novel is a field undergoing a crisis: As funding for the arts declines, as rents go up and freelance rates fail to keep pace with inflation, as generative artificial intelligence grows more prevalent by the day, many artists struggle to find an outlet or audience for their work, and to live off it. Think of the New Yorker<\/em> writer Jia Tolentino, who recently caught flak for announcing (in a since-deleted Instagram post) that she would break her \u201cRIGID sponcon ban\u201d to create an Airbnb \u201cexperience\u201d for her followers. This mirrors the world of Flat Earth<\/em>, where writers might critique the commodification of everyday life and work for corporations on the side. Levy\u2019s novel argues that artists don\u2019t have an authentic position to create from, that everything is corrupted by money.<\/p>\n Indeed, money is everywhere in Flat Earth<\/em>, especially in its relationships. Avery and Frances\u2019s friendship is marked by their opposite financial situations: Avery has no safety net, while Frances gets a monthly allowance of $10,000 from her wealthy southern parents. Avery is a careful observer, a natural scorekeeper. She notices how frequently Frances changes herself in order to win people over. In New York, Frances takes on the persona of a struggling grad student; on their road trip, she becomes a regular American girl, the daughter of a cattle rancher. At one point, she talks about wanting to work as an escort to get money for her film (the novel is unclear about whether she follows through). Avery\u2019s reaction is caustic: She thinks Frances is proposing this \u201conly because she hoped she might get herself sex-murdered by one of these men so that the girls in our department would mythologize her forever and she\u2019d finally get her 16-millimeter films screened.\u201d<\/p>\n But Frances doesn\u2019t get sex-murdered. She finishes her film, goes home to North Carolina, and gets engaged. She drops out of graduate school to marry \u201ca day laborer she had gone to high school with.\u201d At Frances\u2019s wedding, Avery observes that her friend has morphed again, adopting a quasi-tradwife identity. The ceremony is accentuated by the groom\u2019s sisters donning Confederate-flag bikinis and groomsmen holding camouflage-decaled AR-15s. Back in New York, Frances becomes the toast of the art world; her films are screened in galleries. Avery doesn\u2019t have the benefits of such success, but at least she has, for now, her integrity: She can feel superior to her shape-shifting friend without ever having written or made anything herself.<\/p>\n But in Levy\u2019s novel, no one can make it as a writer without selling out. Scrambling to make her tuition payment, Avery starts getting paid to escort and have sex with rich men, an idea Frances once toyed with. In between dates, she tries to write her book. But one night, under the hazy influence of Ambien, she applies to an entry-level job at a new right-wing dating app called Patriarchy. She gets the job, which involves swiping on the app, going on dates with men, and writing weekly reports about her experience. These men are not her type; she usually seeks the company of inaccessible, intellectual men who encourage her self-destructive behavior. Patriarchy instead targets \u201cmen who eat uncooked organ meat, sports gambling enthusiasts, porn-sick degenerates, downwardly mobile white men in red states,\u201d as one executive says to Avery. \u201cDon\u2019t look at me like that, sweetheart. I\u2019m not the one who deindustrialized the Rust Belt and sent all our manufacturing overseas.\u201d As Frances tells Avery, \u201cAll work is sex work. Your mother should just be happy you\u2019re such a mascot for social mobility.\u201d Avery, for her part, hopes she can at least glean some material for her book.<\/p>\n The novel includes some heavy-handed moments. More than once, Avery\u2019s shattered phone screen leaves her thumbs bloody from scrolling, an obvious metaphor for the sometimes painful experience of being online. But there are more subtle scenes that speak to the weirdness of American life, such as when Avery sees climate activists outside the Pacific Fuels and Convenience Summit\u2014a \u201cmultiday networking event for oilmen and gas station operators\u201d\u2014getting arrested. \u201cLeaving the Convention Center, the cops had encircled the protestors. The girls looked good in their summer dresses, zip ties fastened around their tiny wrists.\u201d Avery registers the scene only on a surface level\u2014these beautiful, thin girls!\u2014rather than plumbing for any deeper meaning in this collision of climate change and corporate profit and law enforcement.<\/p>\n By far the best parts of Flat Earth<\/em> are the deeply cynical interludes between chapters, implied to be excerpts from a white paper that Avery wrote for Patriarchy before getting fired for not embodying the app\u2019s values. These missives are bizarre and prophetic, and certainly not an acceptable work product. They read like fiery tweets or diary entries, influenced by the men Avery dates and her general feeling that society is regressing. As she writes in one, \u201cThe men are playing with unstable digital currencies, betting on sports, betting on conspiracy theories and government coups and when the grid will go down. The girls are upending all the progress our mothers made, demanding lower hem lengths and mandatory home economics courses.\u201d<\/p>\n If \u201cthe spirit of the age is paranoia and distrust at everything,\u201d as one interlude asserts, then what of writing\u2014of Avery\u2019s attempts to put something of this illogical system down on paper? After all, writing is a deeply earnest and even optimistic endeavor, one that is at odds with the cynicism produced by the economic conditions of art-making: A book asks the reader to submit to a story and to come through the experience changed, however subtly. Avery\u2019s ex-boyfriend tells her, \u201cYou\u2019re actually a proficient writer. You could be Mary Gaitskill if you weren\u2019t too embarrassed to be seen trying at anything.\u201d Avery does seem allergic to trying hard, to taking herself seriously, to opening herself up to the possibility of failure. In the end, this tension might be the best way to understand Flat Earth<\/em>: It recognizes the twin desires to say something meaningful and to do it without appearing to try. The tricky reality is that, now as ever, the true artist can\u2019t have it both ways.<\/p>\n \u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some people draw an easy, maybe even lazy, distinction between two generations: Gen Z performs coolness and irony, while Millennials are the cohort of political correctness and cringe. Gen Z wears low-rise jeans while Millennials post things such as \u201cYou can pry these high-rise pants from my cold, dead hands!\u201d These theories might make for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3782,455,3357],"class_list":{"0":"post-34115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-artists","9":"tag-real","10":"tag-struggling"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}