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Summary
Summary
This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is "hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend" ( The Washington Post ).
It's the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America's most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.
Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.
Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.
Author Notes
Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Loudermilk and Impossible Views of the World , which was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice, and the collection of stories, Cosmogony . Her writing has appeared in Art in America , Artforum , The Baffler , Frieze , Lapham's Quarterly , and Vogue , among other publications. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy . A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Ives's clever novel (after Impossible Views of the World), it is 2003 and the title character is a brashly self-absorbed walking "boxer-briefs commercial" who concocts a brilliant plan for how to extend his college years of sleeping with hot coeds, with the added bonus of free money: graduate school. Specifically, the MFA in poetry program at the Seminars in Writing, obviously modeled after the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The only problem is that Loudermilk is-to put it kindly-a literal-minded idiot. Enter Harry Rego. Somewhat of an agoraphobe and a former child prodigy who enrolled in college at 15, Harry discovers his surprising penchant for poetry, which Loudermilk submits as his own. The poems get him into the Seminars and garner him praise from his professors and classmates, among them the haughty Anton Beans, an "emerging conceptual lyricist" who cannot believe he is being upstaged by someone as crass as Loudermilk. Harry's growing resentment of Loudermilk, combined with Anton's dogged attempts to unveil him, propels the novel to its final confrontation and reveal-settled by, of course, poetry. The nuanced subversion of tropes and full-throttle self-indulgence of Ives's writing lend a manic glee to this slyly funny and deeply intelligent novel. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A moronic chick magnet gets a scholarship to a prestigious Midwestern writing program on the basis of poetry written by his dweeb sidekick.Meet Troy Augustus Loudermilk: "Six foot three and built like a water polo champion. His face is hard to look away from. His square jaw resolves itself into a gentle cleft above which shapely lips give levity to otherwise chiseled features." What is almost more beautiful than Loudermilk's physical being is his gleefully transcribed speech, sparkling with "dick-munches," "nerf herders," "cum-dumpsters," "jizz rags," "fart crumbs," "brohams," and "get spastic with it, you Amish pirate you." His underdeveloped, terrified henchman, Harry Rego, resembles "a hobbit or shaved teddy bear" and is "not sure what you're supposed to do if you end up in a relationship with someone who may at once be a sociopath and/or pathological liar, plus situational narcissist, and/or suffering from a personality disorder, and then you also feel like they are the only person in the world who's ever understood you." Ives' second novel (Impossible Views of the World, 2017) is half gonzo grad school satire featuring these two princes among men, half theoretical inquiry into the nature of writing and reality. Holding down the more highbrow side of things is a character named Clare Elwil, who contributes a dead father, lots of introspection ("bounding through the endless black and rainbow that is the mountain-heap of images constituting the trash-heap of her being"), and four short stories, which appear as a kind of performance art within the novel. Also included are several of the works Harry writes as T.A. Loudermilkpoems that set the entire student body and faculty back on their heels in awe. We're 99 percent sure the admiration these inspire is supposed to be a joke, but since there were a number of other things that went over our heads, we could be wrong.Wonder Boys meets Cyrano de Bergerac meets Jacques Lacan meets Animal House. Something for everyone. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ives' (Impossible Views of the World, 2017) satirical masterpiece follows poet Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a shallow Adonis recently admitted to the nation's premiere creative-writing graduate program, located in the heart of America's starchy middle (the Iowa Writers' Workshop isn't named but is repeatedly called to mind). The trick is, Loudermilk hasn't written a poem in his life: Harry, an agoraphobic abnormal-psych major, pens every poem Loudermilk brings to class. As Loudermilk romps about campus, tearing through sororities and navigating the egos of alcoholic writing instructors (and their wives and daughters), Harry toils over the typewriter, generating hit after hit that deftly capture the ethos of the 2003, ""mission accomplished"" era. But the jig could never last. Behind Loudermilk and Harry is a small cast of incredibly fleshed-out characters. Readers meet Anton, a Silicon Valley success looking to reconnect to the humanities; Clare, the daughter of a literary legend hoping to carve a canonical place for herself; and the Hillarys, husband-and-wife professors, both with their vices, plus their teenage daughter, Lizzie, a tortured counterculturist hell-bent on bedding Loudermilk. Laugh-out-loud funny and rife with keen cultural observations, Ives' tale is a gloriously satisfying critique of education and creativity.--Courtney Eathorne Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CITY OF GIRLS, by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Riverhead, $28.) Set amid the showgirls, playboys and gossip columnists of Manhattan's 1940s bohemian demimonde, Gilbert's new novel - her first since "The Signature of All Things" (2013) - is a pitch-perfect evocation of the era's tawdry glamour and a coming-of-age story whose fizzy surface conceals unexpected gradations of feeling. BAKHITA: A Novel of the Saint of Sudan, by Véronique Olmi. Translated by Adriana Hunter. (Other Press, $27.99.) A reimagining of the real-life story of St. Josephine Bakhita, captured as a child in Darfur and liberated in Venice. THE QUEEN: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, by Josh Levin. (Little, Brown, $29.) During the Reagan era, the press immortalized Linda Taylor as "the welfare queen," a fur-wearing, Cadillac-driving woman who bilked the system for years. Levin reveals her as a scammer so protean that she had gone by at least eight different names by the time she was 22. SPRING, by AN Smith. (Pantheon, $25.95.) The third novel in Smith's seasonal quartet - consumed with Brexit, refugee detention, social media - suggests we're hurtling toward the horrific. NO VISIBLE BRUISES: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, by Rachel Louise Snyder. (Bloomsbury, $28.) Snyder highlights an epidemic of unacknowledged violence. Fifty women a month are shot and killed by their partners, and she explores the problem from multiple perspectives: the victims, the aggressors and a society that turns a blind eye. THE PIONEERS: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, by David McCullough. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) McCullough's account of the early history of the Ohio Territory is a tale of uplift, with the antislavery settlers embodying a vision of all that was best about American values and American ideals. THE PANDEMIC CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris, by Mark Honigsbaum. (Norton, $29.95.) Despite science's best efforts, pathogens keep crashing our species barrier: In the past century, they include Spanish flu, H.I.V. and Ebola. Honigsbaum analyzes each to explain pandemics. RANGE: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. (Riverhead, $28.) Challenging conventional wisdom, this provocative book cites data to argue that in a complicated world, generalists are more successful than specialists. LOUDERMILK: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, by Lucy Ives. (Soft Skull, paper, $16.95.) This clever satire of writing programs exhibits, with persuasive bitterness, the damage wreaked by the idea that literature is competition. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
