Review: How Lucy Ives turned the ‘What’s in Her Bag’ trope into a brilliantly berserk novel

“What’s in her bag?” It’s an ordinary query posed in girls’s magazines and on YouTube. The solutions are supposed to give readers an intimate glimpse into a classy particular person’s world: what lip gloss she makes use of, what novel she’s studying. In her brilliantly berserk third novel, “Life Is In all places,” Lucy Ives makes use of this conceit to distinctive impact. If we think about, that’s, that the bag in query belonged to an obsessive, freshly jilted graduate scholar, “practically insane with doubt,” awash in stoner wonderment and annoyed literary ambition.

The putative protagonist is Erin Adamo, a grad scholar locked out of her house one evening in New York Metropolis within the fall of 2014. However the curtain doesn’t open instantly on Erin’s life. As a substitute, the novel begins with the fascinating historical past of the invention of botulinum toxin, beginning within the ninth century and following an unlikely path (through its industrial kind, Botox) into the faces of thousands and thousands of girls, together with a member of the English division the place Erin is a scholar.

This disorienting however thrilling opening gambit is cinematic, like a view from house that pans swiftly down right into a single pore on a human face. It prepares the reader for the wild journey forward, for the grand sweep, the layering of chronologies, the manifold references and acts of repetition that make this novel really feel at instances like a significant however hard-to-follow artwork movie.

Following the Botox historical past and a radical, usually hilarious accounting of Erin’s marital breakup and the present drama engulfing her division (involving an older professor and a younger scholar, natch), the reader enters Erin’s bag. What’s in her bag? Two of her personal fiction manuscripts; a monograph from 1978, full with footnotes, authored by the controversial professor about one Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre (a fictional French novelist, however the monograph is so convincing, one takes to Google straightaway to examine); a single web page of educational writing by the Botoxed professor; and a Con Edison invoice addressed to Erin’s erstwhile husband.

They’re all right here, in full, comprising roughly 250 pages of the guide. It’s a transfer the reader would possibly resent, however it’s pulled off compellingly. It helps that Erin’s manuscripts are not less than partially autofiction. They recast occasions the reader already is aware of one thing about, lending the novel a way of perpetual circling and recapitulating.

These paperwork signify a number of makes an attempt, workings-through, iterations of the identical materials, and studying them feels tender if generally voyeuristic. We all know, for instance, that Cody, the philandering husband character in one in every of Erin’s manuscripts, is similar to Erin’s husband. We’re accessing her grief in one other register, one which maybe ought to really feel extra indifferent however really is extra instant and unhappy.

In its spirited play with literary historical past actual and imagined, “Life Is In all places” bears a resemblance to Shola von Reinhold’s extraordinary 2020 novel, “LOTE.” Ives’ story-within-a-story additionally recollects “1001 Arabian Nights,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fireplace” and Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy.” Is one in every of Erin’s characters named Hamlet due to the play-within-a-play in the “Hamlet”? Is LeGouffre an echo of Baudelaire’s poem “Le Gouffre” (gouffre is abyss in French) in “Les Fleurs du Mal”? (This LeGouffre attends Baudelaire’s funeral within the fictional monograph!) Or have we merely fallen into our personal abyss?

Ives additionally presents an array of attainable readings of her personal work. Peppered all through one in every of Erin’s manuscripts are studying comprehension workouts, an alcoholism self-assessment and a dream journal titled “Hypergraphia” (a behavioral situation marked by a compulsion to jot down). We all know Erin’s maternal grandmother might have been a sufferer, however the frequent point out of the dysfunction additionally features as a self-own. Simply because the reader begins to suspect Ives is constitutionally incapable of slicing pages or paragraphs, she throws out the specter of an precise situation that could be afflicting her principal character, probably even the author herself.

Erin’s narrator additionally nurses an obsession with the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, who made large-scale installations of tables of handwritten traces and numbers. These acts of serialization supply a consolation to Erin’s narrator and, perhaps, just like the a number of manuscripts herein, a key to the guide the reader holds in her fingers.

“Life Is In all places” has so much in its bag, however at coronary heart it’s a novel of academia, situating itself inside a protracted, neurotic custom of arduous, insular mental labor and petty competitors amongst students. Its depiction of division dynamics is so pitch excellent as to be actually disconcerting to anybody with private expertise. A professor in a “lurid, floor-length paisley skirt” could be seen “glowering within the nook beneath a stack of muted raw-silk scarves.” A fellow grad scholar, “brittle and wan and proud,” makes Erin really feel unhealthy about herself, ever saying her participation in a convention or roundtable on “the determine of the clerk in no matter.”

“Erin didn’t need to be Alana Harris—and she or he definitely didn’t need to be like her,” Ives writes of this scholar. And but, she wished to own the sort of “potent delusion” that made Alana Harris so productive. (“Grad faculty!!” this reader wrote within the margin.) Despite its many forays into philosophy and even mysticism, these grindingly actual, virtually cringeworthy passages floor the novel.

Generally, nonetheless, the asides really feel extreme. Erin enters the college library, and 4 pages comply with on the lifetime of the antisemitic architect who designed it within the Nineteen Seventies, college students who dedicated suicide there, the set up of panels to forestall related future tragedies and the best way the panels “symbolized the motion of information as zeros and ones.” It’s so much. Ives is able to virtuosic management — there are not less than 10 completely different sorts of writing on this guide, and all are carried off so masterfully it’s virtually scary. On the identical time, it is a murals that appears like a barely contained explosion.

However this unhinged campus novel is, to make use of a campus phrase, generative. It’s “good to suppose with” on an unlimited vary of subjects: the chauvinism of a pressure of literary criticism, the ineffaceable injury performed by households of origin, why we are able to by no means once more recapture the happiness we felt in outdated relationships and even absolutely perceive why we have been really there, to say nothing of why we’re right here now. In lots of cases, Erin appears to lose contact momentarily with the factor we name actuality, and people moments really feel probably the most actual of all. “Phenomenal actuality bobbed,” Ives writes. “It bounced, jiggled.”

Aron is the writer of “Good Morning, Destroyer of Males’s Souls: A Memoir of Ladies, Dependancy, and Love.”