Will I Ever Stop Wanting?

Tierney Finster traverses “Flat Earth,” Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel.

By Tierney FinsterDecember 22, 2025

• Fiction

SOMEONE I USED to sleep with once had an Instagram bio that said, “If you’re reading this, I probably triggered you.” It’s been many years since I looked at their account, yet I couldn’t help but recall the sentiment while reading Flat Earth, the new, debut novel from writer, editor (of Forever Magazine), and Playboy contributor Anika Jade Levy.

Flat Earth epitomizes a cultural reckoning, written by a younger millennial using the language of Gen Z, a lexicon transformed by frustration during a time when the United States no longer feels governable, civil war feels possible, and this period of American decline feels potentially inescapable. It’s a time stamp of a period in which our shared understanding of the world we live in is imploding.

As a social satire, the novel is written to provoke. It does so deliciously, no matter how disgusting some of its content can be. (Take, for instance, the “popular digital artist” who “forms a conceptual online pedophile ring.”) Aspects of the book are uncomfortable to read, and its absurd yet strangely accurate humor feels especially transgressive. It feels propelled by Levy’s compulsory need to say what may otherwise be more comfortable to ignore, not because she subscribes to all of the ideas she’s writing about but as an antidote to the poisonous magical-thinking notion that if we ignore something, it will go away.

While the novel’s protagonist, Avery, and her best friend, Frances, are technically both in grad school at the start of the story, Flat Earth still feels like whatever comes after a campus novel, centered around the awkward class schism that tends to happen among groups of artist friends in their mid-to-late twenties. The invisible threads that once connected Avery’s circle of friends are suddenly torn, and in their absence, class divisions become much more obvious.

Those born into wealth often experience a sense of entitlement that feels unattainable, or at least unlikely, to the rest of us. Their existence is easy, even when it feels difficult. They have enough resources to be full-time artists—the money not only to feed and clothe themselves but also to fund their films and art galleries and crypto start-ups, to pay for weddings and dental work and health insurance. The more money they have, and the less they have to do in order to keep it, the more they inspire envy and desire in those around them. This is what happens in Flat Earth: Avery wants, and she wants a lot.

“I made a list in my head of things that I wanted,” she says. “I wanted to meet someone new. I wanted a Hitachi Magic Wand and a man to tie me to a bed and leave me there to masturbate until I died. I wanted every product I’d ever seen in an advertisement.” Who hasn’t wanted to surrender in a world where their control seems impossible? Who hasn’t wanted to orgasm their way out of overthinking? Who hasn’t wanted to acquire new products in order to renew their will to live?

Avery uses her life as research. She compiles her findings into aphoristic, metafictional cultural reports, which eventually become her grad school thesis. “The American economy is at it again,” Avery writes:

Everywhere it travels, money eliminates friction. It is a pleasure just to be in its vicinity. The paper tells us we are more likely to contract the bubonic plague than we are to win the Powerball, but this only makes us want to buy lottery tickets. Everywhere we go we are asked to pay for things.

These reports feel inspired by the mid-2010s work of the art collective K-Hole, whose trend-forecasting documents doubled as conceptual art pieces. K-Hole’s Youth Mode report most famously introduced “normcore” into the contemporary vocabulary in 2013. “In Normcore, one does not pretend to be above the indignity of belonging,” K-Hole wrote before the term was disambiguated into something strictly sartorial. The K-Hole report is full of other relevant terms like “mass indie” (“The most different thing to do is to reject being different all together”) and “youth mode” itself (“Generational linearity is gone. An ageless youth demands emancipation”). Avery worries about losing her youth, which she believes is the strongest currency she has (however much it depreciates). She hasn’t embraced agelessness in the K-Hole way, but she certainly lives in another type of youth mode—she’s a permanent girl.

Avery understands herself as a commodity whose value decreases with each tick of the clock. The threat of failing to take advantage of what she has looms over her. The Adderall shortage doesn’t help (Adderall is essential to Avery’s creative process).

Flat Earth is filled with Avery’s frustrations about having to be an adult and about what it means to be an adult woman in the world today—or, maybe, who gets to live like an adult under late capitalism. A comment made by Avery’s grandmother, who problematizes her granddaughter’s infinite adolescence, becomes the book’s refrain. It is echoed by more than one older woman in Avery’s life, until she finally regurgitates it to her best friend Frances: “You’re not that young.”  

Frances is Avery’s foil. We experience Frances through Avery’s gaze, framed aspirationally since they first met at their expensive private college. Avery is attracted to Frances’s innate elitism, confusing love and money. Frances seems unafflicted by the economic ennui that eats at Avery. Frances is rich. Better than rich—she’s generationally wealthy. She self-funds a documentary about American disenfranchisement, willfully ignorant of the fact that she is empowered and emboldened by the same capitalist system eating away at her subjects.

During a visit to Frances’s family home, Avery remarks, “It was hard to look at this family, this big colonial house with its crosses carved into every door, and not think that at the heart of their fortune was a crime, and that Frances’s fascination with American decay was somehow part of her spiritual inheritance.” Still, Avery wishes this inheritance was her own. She envies a lot about Frances, not just her money. Frances has an attention span that enables her to work on her project for great lengths of time, even without pharmaceutical support, and to read a book without looking at her phone for 30 whole minutes. Frances knows to fling a garment over a lamp to soften the lighting in a cheap motel room. It’s not just that she’s beautiful, it’s that she seems to know how to bring the beauty out of things. Most of all, Avery misses that Frances once brought the beauty out of her.

Frances has enough privilege to play adult. She cuts her hair, drops out of school, moves home to the South to marry some guy. She doesn’t stop working on her film. She sends the final version of it to Avery, who, feeling abandoned, can barely open the email, let alone click on the file. Frances’s success as a filmmaker inspires dread and drives Avery crazy. Like a brain-rotted Madame Bovary, Avery wants her turn!

Things just seem easier for Frances, or perhaps harder for Avery. According to her mother, she’s always been this way—“hypersexual and materialistic and sad all the time.” Eventually, though, the novel reveals that Frances’s emotional state is not all that different from Avery’s; she just has the comforts of conventional heterocapitalism to hide behind. A house. A husband. But don’t be fooled: she’s just as miserable as everybody else.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Levy thanks another author, Stephanie Wambugu, for naming the book (Frances’s documentary is also called Flat Earth). Flat Earth reminds me of Wambugu’s recent debut, Lonely Crowds (2025), in that both are framed as books about friendship while feeling more like books about loneliness. But isn’t that always the case? Aren’t all the most powerful friendships also calculations of needs unmet?

While both books take on the social politics of the New York art world with healthy doses of disdain, Flat Earth is infused with much more mockery. Futility permeates every room Avery enters. When Frances brings her to the “president’s son’s art opening,” she observes the secret service and “a hundred million dollars’ worth of NYU degrees.” Frances wonders if the crowd is full of “Gallatin girls” because “they look like they designed their own degrees.” Pejorative, duh. Looking around, Avery arrives at a conclusion about her own college experience that’s one of my favorite lines in the book: “I should have double-majored in sucking cock and carrying Narcan.” Perhaps, if that were true, her degrees would at least feel practical.

After describing Flat Earth to a writer I love, she told me, “Levy’s book sounds like one I’d love to be aggravated by.” At this moment in time, when most of what transpires in this country feels like a haunting satire already, you very well might not be in the mood for more of it in your fiction. On the other hand, you might find some twisted pleasure looking into the funhouse mirror and seeing yourself reflected in Levy’s comic distortions, which rely on glaring exaggeration. In one of her early reports, Avery asserts “The Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake,” and the same is true for “mass literacy.”

Flat Earth is full of this vein of right-wing ideology, but nothing about the right-wing world she depicts is attractive. The novel never goes so far as to make an endorsement. Just the opposite: At book’s end, Avery gets fired by Patriarchy, a dating app she starts working for, whose male employees claim she isn’t the “right kind of wom[a]n.”

Am I being too generous? Is this book just a couple of hundred pages spent in the mind of a Dimes Square edgelord writing for the male gaze? Does it matter if it is? It’s giving American Psycho—which is a compliment. It’s full of misogyny, but so is the world.

It’s easy to hide behind a cult of vagueness (to borrow a term from artist Andrea Fraser, as relayed to me by her student, Hollywood Gifts creator Madeleine Kunkle). Levy is doing the opposite. She just says the thing outright—and in so doing, implicates you as a reader. Avery might be conflict-avoidant, but Levy isn’t. Her prose is cold and crystal clear. Her voice casts a spell, as consistent as it is authentic. I found Flat Earth more seductive than my phone. Reading it was just as easy as scrolling. That’s a meaningful compliment!

The book is bleak, but so is a declining America (though the novel happened to launch on the same promising day that Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election). For some, the book’s aesthetics might inspire a Red Scare jump scare—the young, white thinspiration of it all—but Levy’s work uses those aesthetics more than it venerates them. There’s a beauty and tenderness to Avery’s yearning, to her feeling inconsequential. At the climax of the book, in the midst of Avery and Frances’s nonconflict, Avery is still using Frances’s lipstick—the one she stole from the blood-flecked floor of Frances’s childhood bedroom. She can’t afford to give it back. She doesn’t want to give it back.

Ultimately, I felt bad for Avery, and for her two-digit bank account. I believe everyone deserves a universal basic income, even jealous bitches.