LIFE IS EVERYWHERE

A story about writing stories—and related phenomena—from the author of Cosmogony (2021) and Loudermilk (2019).

At some point during the latter half of his reign, Byzantine emperor Leo VI banned the production of blood sausage. “This edict,” an omniscient—or maybe “omniscient”—narrator tells us, “is thought to be the earliest written evidence of an outbreak of botulism.” Several pages later, we are introduced to Faith Ewer, a university professor who avails herself of Botox injections and has, thanks to a departmental scandal, been roped into co-teaching a class with Isobel Childe, a colleague she despises. Doctoral candidate Erin Adamo makes her first appearance—unnamed—on Page 33, and it takes a while to realize that she is not only the protagonist of this text, but also the author of several of its precariously connected parts. Erin’s early invisibility makes sense when we realize that she is a woman in the process of falling apart and—through reading and writing—re-creating herself. Erin has a history of trauma that makes her connection to reality rather tenuous, and the discovery that her husband, Ben, has been prodigiously unfaithful is one more emotional blow than she can easily absorb. Late in the text, there’s a rejection letter from an agent who doesn’t feel like she can sell Erin’s novel or novella—both of which are part of Ives’ novel. “As observant and unique and refreshingly strange as these narratives are, they are still difficult for the reader to connect to on an emotional level, in part because the protagonists’ troubling lack of agency is never fully explained.” Erin herself understands that readers want protagonists who overcome conflict. Her protagonists do not, and neither does she. This is to say that the agent’s critique of Erin’s work—and Erin’s own critique of her work—is a critique of Ives’ work. To invoke the word metanarrative doesn’t really begin to describe what the author is doing here—at least in part because readers might reasonably debate what the “narrative” is. Ives has created a novel in which the main character finds release, if not catharsis, in a novella written by another author who is also Ives’ creation. Erin decides to read the novella after reading a scholarly article about the novella which refers to a monograph about the novella’s author that Erin has also read. All of these documents—the novella, the article, the monograph—have, of course, been composed by Ives. This work is a commentary on itself, which should feel claustrophobic, but, by the end, readers might come away with the sense that Erin may have escaped this enchanted circle. Not the kind of resolution most readers crave, perhaps, but it’s something.

A novel—in the loosest sense of the term—for people who love footnotes.