Lucy Ives mixes genres with unusual abandon in her second novel, Loudermilk. The narrative could be regarded as a campus novel, a portrait of the artist, a scam story, a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, or a farce. The novel’s namesake, Troy Loudermilk, is a handsome lunk plucked from Animal House, and he sets the plot in motion by deciding to prolong his university experience at the Seminars for Writing, a barely veiled version of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Loudermilk is not a gifted poet. His use of figurative language tends, for example, toward telling his friend Harry that “if the bunch in Harry’s panties were to get any bunchier they’d have to get him a wheelbarrow to roll it around in.” Harry is Loudermilk’s best friend from undergrad days, and his talented Cyrano. Loudermilk lives in hiding, writing poems that he signs “T.A. Loudermilk” and, with Harry’s help, soon prove to be the best the Seminars have ever seen.
As Ives mixes genres, so she mixes ideas. Loudermilk is a novel about the tension between art and life, and the conflict between labor and power. Like most novels, it concerns what Harry terms “the project of living,” which is one that he doesn’t care for. Although he never wrote poetry before Loudermilk enlisted him to do so, Harry both loves it and is good at it. He’s extremely happy holed up in the terrible house he shares with Loudermilk, gleaning interesting language from crossword puzzles and radio news. Soon, he’s writing strange, political poetry — because Loudermilk is about politics, too.
More precisely, Loudermilk is a novel about American politics in 2003, at the height of the War on Terror. Harry isn’t paying attention to America’s wars as such; when he hears the phrase civilian status, he decides he likes it, then wonders whether there are other such statuses. “There must be,” he concludes, at which point the narrator adds, “There are. Harry is living in America.” Ives is interested in America as a nation of ignorers in which freedom consists in part of privilege and blindness. Loudermilk, of course, embodies that freedom. His “freedom is remarkable. It’s brilliant, irresistible. Proprieties, doubts, fears, and so forth are simply not part of his makeup.” He careens around the fictional college town of Crete as America careens around the world in 2003: oversized, greedy, possibly well-intentioned, but who knows? Not Loudermilk, and not the reader.
Loudermilk is archetypally American in another way, too. He benefits — a good poetic capitalist — from the fruit of Harry’s labor. As Ives puts it in her afterword, “Loudermilk is an American and thus takes great pride in seeking petty advantage.” Harry seems aware that Loudermilk is seeking such an advantage. Ives includes several of his poems, which are excellent, in the novel, and in one, he writes, “What, then, / Is the American, this new man, if all his powers / Must be wielded through others? The solutions / Will be centuries in coming.” For Harry, this must be a personal question as well as a global one. What is Loudermilk, if his power must be wielded through Harry?
In 2019, this question is somewhat more pressing than it was in 2003. Thanks to Silicon Valley, Americans can wield power through others dozens of times a day. Uber, TaskRabbit, and countless other apps let the rich conduct the unpleasant parts of their lives via the poor. The freelance marketplace Fiverr’s recent ad campaign earned backlash for juxtaposing an image of a mid-forties white man with a younger black woman, along with a caption reading, “Your project is due ASAP. She’ll be on it before EOD.” One could interpret Loudermilk’s Cyrano scheme as a one-man Fiverr of sorts. (One could also imagine a ghostwriting-on-demand app called Cyrano.) Certainly, the scheme is predicated not only on Loudermilk’s loud power, but on Harry’s lack thereof.
Harry is a shy, strange man, with childhood trauma that seem to have yielded adult agoraphobia. He hates the sound of his own voice. The world may be too much with most of us, per Wordsworth, but the world is not enough with Harry. In a way, this makes Loudermilk’s scheme perfect for him. His anxiety vanishes to nothing when he’s allowed to spend his time alone, writing poetry. At first, Loudermilk tries to get him outside, motivated by a mixture of empathy and a desire to make Harry “write the poems that, like, emerge, no, explode from the pen of this beautiful man,” i.e. himself. Loudermilk is unaware of newspapers, and the radio, and introspection. He cannot imagine how Harry might produce poetry while left on his own — or, as Loudermilk puts it, “You and I, we’re going to take over poetry! My face, your brains. My ideas, your, um, spirit or whatever. If it’s just you hermitting out in here, sniffing your stale jizz rags and contemplating your fart crumbs, that’s not really gonna happen, if you catch my drift. Those are not the true immortal themes, bro!”
Setting aside how much fun it must have been for Ives, who is otherwise an off-kilter and hyper-precise stylist, to write Loudermilk’s beer-pongy banter, this passage raises one of Loudermilk’s key questions. What are the true immortal themes? For Harry, politics become a big one. So do alienation and confusion. He constructs his poems by collecting “certain groups of words [that] appear to him with a lasso around them, a magic circle alerting him to their pertinence,” then assembling them such that each word or phrase “definitely cannot mean the very thing it usually means.” The resulting poems are prosy and flat, with a strange melody underneath. They “dance but we won’t touch,” as Harry writes in one. Each one keeps the reader at an addictively enjoyable distance.
So do the short stories of Clare Elwil, the other writer in Loudermilk. Clare is an unhappy fiction prodigy with writer’s block so severe that during her first semester at the Seminars, she can’t write at all. Eventually, she discovers that she can write if she pretends to be one of her classmates, but for a long time, she’s paralyzed, for which she judges herself severely. Surely, Clare thinks, “it is not OK to not work … One must work to justify one’s being. There is no right, otherwise.” Harry’s unworldliness makes him immune, for much of Loudermilk, from the idea that writing is work. Like all real-life writers, though, Clare knows otherwise. Writing may feel like an inexplicable, mystical process to her, but it’s also her lone source of money, approval, and identity.
This makes Clare’s writer’s block a catastrophe. It also shows her the path back to writing. Clare starts trying to write like her classmates in order to not write about “the most obvious subject, as far as she is concerned: the long string of failures to either kill herself or be abruptly destroyed that have made up her triangulation within her mother’s sense of modern love.” That subject is obvious because it’s the truth of Clare’s life, and because she has no choice about it. In contrast, “What you write has to be a choice, Clare thinks … It has to be work. It cannot be the truth.”
This process is the opposite of Harry’s. He repurposes old truths to create new ones; Clare tries on new selves to avoid her old one. Her stories, though, come out sounding a lot like Harry’s poems: laconic yet musical, full of brain teasers and logic puzzles. Of course, this is true because Ives wrote them, but it’s not incidental that both Harry’s poems and Clare’s stories set out to confuse the reader. The true immortal themes are confusing—why else would they be immortal? Literary ambition, almost by definition, means wanting to make readers think.
By the end of Loudermilk, even Loudermilk himself wants to think. The Seminars have rubbed off on him, or else Harry has. Or maybe it’s just that Loudermilk is a perennial self-inventor. As a manifestation of the American Dream, he has to be. In Harry’s eyes, Loudermilk is “quite committed to humanity,” but really, he’s committed to himself, and blind to all else. For that reason, the one poem he writes — “The CNN Blues (Persona Poem)” — is hilariously, laboriously bad. The only persona Loudermilk can construct is his own.
Harry, on the other hand, emerges as Loudermilk’s clear hero. His creative trajectory in the novel is joyous. He starts as an unhappy, agoraphobic scammer anxiety-puking in a Big Gulp cup on the drive to the Seminars, and ends as a newly fledged artist. If Loudermilk is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he’s Stephen Daedalus. If it’s a campus novel, he’s the big man by the end. If it’s a Marxist parable, he’s the un-alienated worker, freed to determine his own labor. Of course, 2003 America was a highly non-Marxist place, and Clare’s suffering demonstrates how unpleasant it can be to take full responsibility for one’s artistic self. Still, Harry frees himself from exploitation and deception. He gets to be publicly attached to his art. He gets to succeed — and what theme is more American, and less mortal, than that?
[Published May 7, 2019 by Soft Skull Press, 352 pages, $16.95 paperback original]