02/08/2026 Sunday Sext. As part of my personal Great Leap Forward, I have decided to start writing book reviews, or maybe more generally put, Written Responses To Things I Have Read. This is the kind of declaration that has the potential to age very poorly and somewhat embarrassingly if I ultimately find myself without the vigour and commitment needed to follow through. How many things have I posted on this blog promising a part two or even three, only to never follow up? But over the past year of my life many things have changed, and I have lost the structures in my life that really helped me stay mentally engaged and feel like a person. The cogs of my brain have come to move slow and painstakingly, so in order to regain my former glory in which I felt smart, quick, engaged, and consumed rapturously every written text I got my hands on, I have decided that the first step should be to force myself to articulate things. Reading words begets thoughts, of thoughts are begotten words, and these in turn are recycled into yet more thoughts. Slowly but surely, the brain begins to fill out its waistline. We hope.

Agnes Lives! Starts off as a tough pill to swallow. The overload of twee Obama era-isms is at first enough to turn the stomach, but beneath the surface trappings of 2014 is a cultural commentary far more apt for the 2020s, with our ongoing anti-progressive backlash (the “anti-woke” cultural moment of which we are currently hopefully seeing the last), the erosion of women’s rights, the return of conservative cultural attitudes among young people, the waning of the body positivity movement, and the subsequent return to rigid beauty standards, thinness, and clean girl aesthetics. One aspect of our current cultural context that makes this book particularly timely is today’s cynical, apathetic return to the status quo following the MeToo Movement’s ultimate loss of momentum and resulting failure to snowball into real structural change. The movement’s rise and fall over the last decade-ish has taught us, if nothing else, that powerful men will never relinquish the social structures and cultural attitudes that allow them to sexually abuse women with impunity. Men continue to rape and pillage, women continue to cry out for deliverance, and they are only met with silence. In the 2010s, MeToo offered a glimmer of optimism, a better path forward, the feeling that meaningful change was possible. And now, we are left bitter and alone to contemplate the dried-out carcass of a failed revolution. From the malaise borne of that disillusionment emerges Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s debut as a novelist.

Newton’s breakneck prose, reflecting the manic flightiness of the book’s protagonist, is an untiring barrage of short staccato sentences, schizophrenically saturated with references to pop culture, twists and turns, and fractal chains of digressions so constant and long-winded that at any given moment you may no longer really be able to identify where or what the main thought is. It slaps you in the face, and you may need a minute to acclimate. Its pop culture-heaviness and short attention span make it a perfect reflection of the oversaturated, overstimulated inner state of the subject in the digital era. Like scrolling your twitter feed or instagram reels, it blurs together to create a uniform, textured flow of comfortable numbness. When shocking events occur in the story or when horrifying revelations are made about the titular Agnes’ past, they cut through this uniform cognitive flow like a hot knife, unsettling the mental scrolling state the reader has fallen into, creating a singularly jarring effect.

This is not to say that the individual references that make up this constant onslaught of allusions are pacing devices devoid of meaning; far from it, the range of music, literature, visual art, history, politics etc invoked paint the picture of both a highly cultured and knowledgeable author, and one who knows how to use the power of reference to paint a very detailed portrait of her protagonist. Newton is not in free association mode here, and while carefully cultivated to look flailing and random, the constant stream of external references in Agnes’ inner monologue consists of a very coherent catalogue of things and paints a vivid portrait of who she is.

In many ways, Agnes Lives! Is kind of a woman’s American Psycho, but with Agnes as main character, the gendered dynamics of commodification, sexualisation, violence, rape, and finally murder, rather than being reversed, turn inward. Living in an oversaturated and casually callous world, sexually abused by a constant stream of men since the earliest days of her youth, and having finally come to base her self-worth in her desirability, Agnes desires revictimisation, seeking to find meaning in embracing her role in the dynamic of male-on-female violence. In absence of any real emotional support or protection to help her understand the things she has faced, they have built up inside of her and poisoned her thoughts, becoming twisted and turning inward into maladaptive survival strategies over the course of decades of victimisation that she has suffered with nowhere to turn. She has come to view herself as a commodity. She has sacrificed her interiority for a collection of status symbols. She has sacrificed her individuality and trained herself to become an archetypical ideal, serving variously as a muse, a sex object, a prop in the lives of men. She has sacrificed her agency, or rather repurposed it, to better submit to male desire. Feeling the pressure of age and faced with the existential threat of her physical desirability reaching an expiration date in the eyes of the men whose violence she craves, she flails wildly, grasping at any sign of attention from every man she meets, a desperate act of bargaining, trying to convince herself of her desirability. At its crux, this is a story about a woman who has been conditioned to find meaning in the victimisation she experiences at the hands of men, and who, faced with the threat of losing her desirability to those men, seeks to find the ultimate reassurance of her worth by taking her role in the dynamic of gendered violence to its final, inevitable conclusion: a violent death at the hands of a man.

Agnes is obnoxious, entitled, and rude, a chronic name-dropper who looks down her nose at every person she comes into contact with, with the exception of the men whose approval she craves. We start the journey of reading this book with quite a sense of disdain for this person; as the story progresses and we learn more about her, at some point in the constant, churning forward flow, maybe without realising it until it has already happened, we start to sympathise with and pity her. At the end, we find some satisfaction in how her wild, flailing crusade has claimed as collateral damage several of the people who have harmed her in the past, leaving them dead or injured while she, in spite of her best efforts, escapes serious harm.

With witty, cutting satire on today’s writing industry and the personality archetypes that infest it, the artful use of tasteful shock value, and an insightful contemplation of the ways in which sexual violence can slowly destroy a life, Agnes Lives! is a fantastic read.

-A