You wouldn't expect from the nearly monochromatic, very serious cover of Anika Jade Levy's debut, FLAT EARTH, that this is actually (at times) quite a funny novel. It's narrated by Avery, a graduate student and aspiring writer who's finding it difficult to get by in New York City without adequate prescription stimulants. Unable to work on her own projects, she tags along as her best friend Frances, an emerging filmmaker, takes a road trip to small towns across the country, interviewing folks for Frances' experimental documentary.

"Her subjects were usually incels, or semi-prominent online eugenicists, or teenagers with multi-hyphenated political ideologies who had been radicalized on web forums, or else it was just some morbidly obese single mother she found on the street and foisted her microphone onto. She was trying to make something really American."

"...a slim, cogent novel that feels as much like a portrait of a generation, or a historical moment, as it does a chronicle of a specific person --- funny, fragmented, just shy of hopeless."

This kind of sly tone persists throughout the book, even when the subject matter grows ever darker. Upon returning to New York, Frances ostensibly throws in the towel on an artistic life. Instead, she retreats to the conventional heteronormative world of her southern upbringing, complete with a well-mannered fiancé and a sprawling southern estate. She leaves Avery to fend for herself, making a living not through art, exactly, but by professionally dating older men on an app called Patriarchy.

When Frances' documentary does get released to accolades, Avery struggles with feelings of inadequacy (and later, when the inevitable online backlash ensues, smugness), only to be confronted with stark reality when Frances faces a crisis.

The relationship between the two young women --- both flailing somewhat in their attempts to navigate coming of age as artists --- forms the arc of Avery's story, although it's also about her growing recognition that both love and professional life are perhaps inauthentic at their core. Avery caroms between two men known only as the Law Professor and the Sculptor, both of whom treat her somewhere between mildly annoying and entirely disposable. Their relationships --- like all of these women's to a certain degree --- feel inauthentic and mediated, the likely byproduct of a life spent primarily online.

In between Avery's narratives are strings of epigrammatic pronouncements, some in the voice of a plural "we": "The 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." The result is a slim, cogent novel that feels as much like a portrait of a generation, or a historical moment, as it does a chronicle of a specific person --- funny, fragmented, just shy of hopeless.