About
Everything that happened was repetition. But it was repetition with a difference. So, she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form.
Manhattan, 2014. It's an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents' apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father, once again, lost control.
Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she's written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who's recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn't sure what she's doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she's needed all along.
With unflinching precision, “Life Is Everywhere” captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It's about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak, a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives's latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.
Manhattan, 2014. It's an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents' apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father, once again, lost control.
Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she's written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who's recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn't sure what she's doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she's needed all along.
With unflinching precision, “Life Is Everywhere” captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It's about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak, a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives's latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"One of the year's most impressive books in any genre. . . . Lucy Ives' new novel is unconventional and resourceful, sorrowful and perceptive, a challenging, rewarding book full of irreverent humor, rich imagery and engrossing digressions. . . . In Life Is Everywhere, she's written the sort of book that eludes all but the most talented of novelists."
Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Ives possesses an enthralling emotional and psychological acuity, a seemingly bottomless store of knowledge and a thrilling wit, all of which she applies to the systems under which we live"
and how we manage to live within or outside them."