"We are offered a number of glancingly weird details about Avery. For example, she keeps Frances's cut-off fishtail braid in a Tupperware container under her bed; she's hooking up with a law professor because he's the only one who's 'sufficiently violent' with her; and, by the same logic, she won't fuck an obituarist from a good family because he's too attentive. These so-called character traits are passingly evocative but ultimately empty because they don't excavate an actual character, just betray her lack of depth, a sense of numbed-out nothingness."
"It's made up of clipped sentences that often have some surprising but emotionless turn: 'If I had endometriosis, that meant I might never be able to have a baby. On the other hand, maybe I could write about my diagnosis for a feminist magazine.' Those units - sometimes a single sentence"
Anika Jade Levy's 'Flat Earth' follows Avery, a grad student in media studies who becomes increasingly jealous of her best friend Frances, an heiress whose art film about flat-earth conspiracists gains significant attention in the art world. Avery exhibits bizarre behavioral traits, including keeping Frances's cut braid in a container and seeking out violent sexual encounters while rejecting gentler partners. The novel employs a detached, clipped narrative style with emotionless turns of phrase that prioritize surface-level oddities over substantive character exploration. The protagonist demonstrates minimal introspection, suggesting intentional flatness rather than depth, leaving readers with a sense of emotional numbness and disconnection from the narrative.
Read at Hyperallergic
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