In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.

In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson glimpses a woman in a blue hospital mask at a flea market in Athens buying a kitschy bauble—a pair of toy mechanical horses—which she inexplicably also badly wants for herself. Unable to fully view the woman’s face, Elsa comes to believe she is actually seeing in the mysterious, attractive stranger some version of herself, or rather, a doppelgänger of sorts. “My startling thought at the moment was that she and I were the same person.”

Levy’s readers would be surprised if she didn’t set a novel in the aftermath of the Great Lockdown of 2020, when “everyone looked dazed and battered,” even as the worst of the pandemic had passed. She has always used the defining events of recent times—the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the financial crisis, Brexit—as the soundtrack for her stories. The sense of the displacement and unease that come with living amid historic disruption is what gives her books an edge of menace and suggest ambition belied by their relative brevity.

The quintessential Levy subject is a member of the intelligentsia, a historian studying male tyrants, a poet, a doctoral student in anthropology. These characters are 21st-century Herzogs, who can’t help but channel their neuroses through the prism of their intellectual fixations. In Hot Milk, the anthropologist’s relationship with her mother is a kinship structure endlessly turned over. In The Man Who Saw Everything, the historian notes that Stalin would flirt with women by throwing bread at them—a habit of hurling carbs that we learn his own tyrannical father shares. These academic overlays are one of the playful pleasures of her books.

Elsa fits the Levy archetype. She is a prodigy, plucked from foster parents at the age of 6 so that a great teacher, Arthur Goldstein, can raise her to become a virtuoso. He is Elsa’s gay, pompously pedantic Henry Higgins, who trains her to detach her mind from the commonplace so that she can master the classical repertoire.

But when the book begins, and Elsa is rummaging through the market in Athens, she has just humiliatingly stumbled from the path to greatness that Goldstein plotted. While performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Golden Hall in Vienna, she begins subconsciously playing her own dissonant notes, which she eventually realizes is an assertion of her own creative impulses, and then walks off the stage, as the maestro disdainfully mocks her.  

[Read: Deborah Levy’s disorienting, captivating fiction]

An identity crisis—which begins just before the concert, when Elsa dyes her hair blue, an event that she describes as a severing of relations with the birth mother who abandoned her—swells to become debilitating. Like so many of Levy’s other protagonists, she finds herself bopping across locales in Europe’s touristed southern reaches, on meandering sun-drenched odysseys in search of healing.

Levy’s novels have an undeniable—and undeniably winning—eccentricity. The introduction of a doppelgänger is a typically atypical move. Levy doesn’t exactly practice magical realism; her books are too tethered to the practicalities of life to ever be described that way. But her plots turn on weird moments and comical misunderstandings—if not magic, exactly, then serendipity seems to infuse her fictional worlds. Small details are inflated with symbolic significance; words and phrases repeat with murky purpose.

But the presence of Levy’s double is one of the most overtly intentional ideas in her fiction. It is central to her feminism, the political commitment that subtly permeates her novels and less subtly shapes her nonfiction. And it’s a device that she has used to make sense of her own life’s struggles. The doppelgänger doesn’t just stalk Levy’s protagonist; it stalks the entirety of her work.  

In the United States, much of the popular affection for Levy rests on a superb trilogy of memoirs—what she called a “living autobiography”—which includes a slim volume, Things I Don’t Want to Know. The book posed as a feminist response to George Orwell’s famous essay “Why I Write.” Levy adopted what Orwell called his “four great motives for writing” and used them for her chapter titles, even if the substance of her argument was elliptical in a way Orwell’s was not. Casting Orwell as her foil wasn’t a gesture of aggressive iconoclasm. Rather, she exploited the template to explain herself, showing how the impulses propelling the female author were far different from those that moved Orwell.

To attach one’s memoir to Orwell might seem a touch brash, given that the essayist’s biography is the romantic definition of the independent writing life, with its shunning of material glories in the stubborn pursuit of righteous causes. But there’s a parallel that doesn’t feel strained: Levy also suffered critical neglect for much of her career. In her early 50s, she couldn’t find a major publisher for her novel Swimming Home, so she released it with a small nonprofit press, supported by the British government and reader subscriptions.

Swimming Home was her first novel in 15 years and the sort of midlife success that rarely happens. It caught critics by surprise and gave her the first of three consecutive turns as a Booker Prize finalist. That Levy’s flourishing came belatedly is not terribly surprising, given the story contained in her autobiography—a series of personal crises and one long search-and-rescue mission for her authentic self.  

At the age of 5, a special branch of the South African police grabbed her father, an academic and activist, from the family bungalow in the middle of the night. He eventually stood trial alongside Nelson Mandela, his comrade in the African National Congress. During her father’s years in prison, Levy’s mother shipped her off to her godmother in Durban, where she attended a Catholic school and lived under the roof of a draconian patriarch.

When the apartheid government released her father—she was 9—the family sought sanctuary in the U.K. But exile exacerbated a growing sense of alienation, as she tried to assimilate into the dreary existence of 1970s England. Levy coped with the dislocation by reinventing herself as a teenage bohemian, even as she was sitting in working-class greasy spoons that didn’t have the faintest touch of Parisian sophistication. “I was a sad girl impersonating a sad girl,” she recalls.

Her sense of alienation tailed her into adulthood—when motherhood meant that she tended to her family at the expense of her own happiness and artistic fulfillment: “To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.”

That Levy would ultimately fix on the idea of a doppelgänger is an understandable response to her personal history of tumult and the nagging sense of inauthenticity. To swerve from the expected course so often is to become inevitably fascinated by what Philip Roth once described as the “counterlife,” the alternative version of existence, where what ifs are fully rendered in the imagination. In her memoirs, she imagines encountering her own double—her young émigré self visiting her in middle age, after her divorce, when she is sitting in her North London apartment block watching the Great British Bake Off.

The idea of the doppelgänger cuts to the essence of her feminism: Mothers are haunted by the life they had before children and by the concession they have made to family. Liberation is recovery of that alternative self uninhibited by social strictures. It is “learning how to be a subject rather than a delusion.”

What’s thrilling about Levy’s novels is that they are alive with this relentless spirit of questing. Copying Orwell’s essay format is emblematic of her impish experimentalism. Her best novels take structural risks. The Man Who Saw Everything is divided into two parts, separated by 28 years, each repeating the same unlikely moment, when the book’s central subject steps into the crosswalk of Abbey Road and then gets knocked down by a car driven by a German man. It’s a nod to a famed image and clever conceit. The reprisal of the accident allows her to revisit events in the first half of the book. With the benefit of time, the narrator’s narcissistic misreading of his relationships is exposed.

[Read: Writing in the ruins]

Levy’s collected work is like a Freudian universe of symbols and phrases, which recur within her books—and across her books. She describes someone misquoting the famous line from The Communist Manifesto about a specter haunting Europe—and then the word specter begins to haunt the novel itself, provoking the reader every time it turns up, forcing deeper consideration of its meaning.

Certain questions she poses, using the same phrasing, appear verbatim in different books. In one of her volumes of memoir, she asks, “What do we do with the things that we don’t want to know?” The question inspired that book’s title—and it appears again in August Blue. A question that would obsess someone tormented by their counterlife.

August Blue has its share of invention, but not relative to Levy’s recent books. In the end, Elsa sits with Goldstein, her teacher and surrogate father, as he lies dying in a small house in Sardinia. He is a bit of a bully, but the only source of affection in her life, however contingent it might be on her artistic success.

She has certainly lived the life that Goldstein selected for her. He changed her name—from Ann to Elsa—and charted her career, in part, to validate his own genius as a teacher. Only in the dark shadow of his impending death does Elsa set aside her fears and resentments to learn the identity of her birth parents. This is, in the end, an archetypal plot we’ve seen over and over at the multiplex: an adopted child confronting her terrifying longing for self-knowledge.

What’s more, Levy’s feminist critique of the classical-music world is uncharacteristically lumpy. She overworks the theme of a woman forced to master the scores of male geniuses while suppressing her own creativity. Elsa spends her free time watching YouTube videos of the dancer Isadora Duncan, envying her artistic freedom, a preoccupation that is a bit too crudely deployed as the liberatory counterpoint to Elsa’s sense of being shackled to the repertoire.

Yet even in this less fully realized novel—her best are The Man Who Saw Everything and Hot Milk—Levy showcases her idiosyncratic mind. If the ultimate aim of feminism, as she preaches it, is to reclaim individuality, to banish the haunting specter of a more fulfilled, more authentic version of one’s self, her prose models this idea. Her language is beautifully her own: She describes the entertaining of suicidal thoughts as “standing on the forbidden pasture”; she calls Elsa’s dyed mane “very expressed hair.” Her imagery is pungently original. She shows us Elsa’s capacity for cruelty by having her unflinchingly stab a sea urchin with a fork while on a diving trip.

Levy’s subjects are credible intellectuals, because she is too. When she casually inserts a riff about Nietzsche’s failed musical experiments into dialogue, it is organic and interesting. Her reading of Freud is never far beneath the surface of her prose—and it’s almost a Freudian joke that she repeats the Freudian phrase “things we don’t want to know” so often. As an observer, she’s able to conjure the historic moment that has just passed, describing the ennui of the pandemic with disturbing precision, capturing the awkwardness of everyday human interactions in the aftermath of quarantine.

Because of her feminism—and her eccentricity—Levy tends to be squeezed into niches by critics in a way that fails to capture the ambition of her books. The Financial Times recently dubbed her “a cult novelist.” But this feels stingy. Instead we should call her what she is: one of the most lively, most gratifying novelists of ideas at work today.