Review: 'Life Is Everywhere,' by Lucy Ives

An ingenious blend of distinct narrative voices, Lucy Ives' new novel is unconventional and resourceful, sorrowful and perceptive, a challenging, rewarding book full of irreverent humor, rich imagery and engrossing digressions. The aptly titled "Life Is Everywhere" succeeds on various fronts. It's a mordant campus novel, a meticulous portrait of psychological anguish and a sneakily suspenseful literary mystery. It brims with intellectual energy and sentences you'll want to read aloud to loved ones.

Erin Adamo, Ives' heroine, is an English grad student in Manhattan. She suffers from a mental illness that hinders her ability "to comprehend the order in which basic life tasks needed to unfold" and causes hallucinations — she recently spotted poet Marianne Moore's ghost "traversing the greensward with stentorian dignity in a flapping cape." Compounding her problems, Erin's husband is sleeping around.

The school's scandal-riven English department is not a place to which Erin can turn for order or solace. Not long ago, one of Erin's fellow students was discovered after hours in tenured professor Roger Herbsweet's office; it seems the aging libertine professor is having another taboo tryst. Like Erin, his troubles are manifold — another scholar has publicly questioned the legitimacy of Roger's only notable work of scholarship.

How bookish is this novel? The action doesn't really begin until Erin parks herself in a library study carrel. At which point, "Life Is Everywhere" begins its metamorphosis, taking us into the pages of the books Erin is carrying in her bag. These include her unfinished novellas and Herbsweet's self-indulgent nonfiction book — all invented, of course, by Ives.

For each of these imaginary texts, Ives adopts different prose styles and narrative voices, from academic-ese and juvenilia to postmodernism and autofiction. She's deft at lampooning scholarly pretentions, conjuring hilarious endnotes for Herbsweet's book; one mentions a "very unique twenty-six-volume" series of books on "doggerel of the early to mid-nineteenth century."

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Ives depicts Erin's emotional difficulties with immense specificity and unusual metaphors, likening her depression to a metal shard lodged in her body; a movie about Erin's life made without her input; and "a net, a gate, a spell." At "its onset," Erin writes in an autobiographical novella, "it expressed itself via off-color remarks at dinner parties and weddings, etc., short skirts and carefully applied makeup, the cunning deployment of my vivid face." Convinced that her mother finds her disgusting, Erin finds this "a facet of myself I seemed helpless not to pursue."

Meanwhile, Ives pens fascinating digressions on obscure episodes in medical and artistic history; these prove important to Erin's story. And her sentences about mundane occurrences are frequently beautiful. "Gliding into its stop in midtown," a Manhattan bus is "a very big swan of ungodly weight," she writes.

Ives isn't well-known, mainly because her work — she's published several previous books — can be somewhat challenging. But she's clearly brilliant, and in "Life Is Everywhere," she's written the sort of book that eludes all but the most talented of novelists.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City and a regular reviewer for the Star Tribune.

Life Is Everywhere

By: Lucy Ives.

Publisher: Graywolf, 472 pages, $18.