Containment and Collapse: On Lucy Ives’ “Life Is Everywhere”
Lucy Ives | Life Is Everywhere: A Novel | Graywolf Press | October 2022 | 427 Pages
“I now propose the bottle as hero.” - Ursula Le Guin
This odd little epigraph appears a third of the way through Lucy Ives’s novel Life Is Everywhere. It’s from a 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which Le Guin proposes that the container, not the spear, was the first tool invented by humans—and that it is also the better analogy for storytelling. The swaggering tales of vanquishment that populate the Western imagination—your Robinson Crusoes and Odysseys—which Le Guin terms “killer stories,” assume the logic of the spear. Domination is their ideological basis, and they follow a linear trajectory towards their aims. In these stories, men are elevated to the status of heroes through the steady, if rocky, progression of time and character development.
Container stories, conversely, eschew ideological agendas and narrative simplicity. Their purpose is neither “resolution nor stasis” but “continuing process” in which things are held together “in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” They are less concerned with formulating bits of content into a cogent sequence than with casting attention onto the “vessel” as a whole. This epigraph, then, is a rousing endorsement for form over content: The bottle is the hero, not the substance within it.
Plenty of novels—modern novels especially—qualify as “container fiction.” But few interpret Le Guin’s theory literally, as Ives does in Life Is Everywhere. The author saddles her protagonist, Erin Adamo, a literature doctoral candidate moonlighting as a fiction writer, with a physical bag that contains material from three books—two of which are Erin’s own manuscripts, the other her professor’s dissertation—a page belonging to her advisor, and an unpaid utility bill.
Erin isn’t introduced immediately, however. First the scene is set: Her department at an unnamed New York university (spoiler: it’s NYU) is mired in a campus sex scandal involving a hoary tenured professor (author of the aforementioned dissertation), Roger Herbsweet, and a female student named Alana. The cleaning staff finds the student under Herbsweet’s desk, half-clothed, on all fours, and in a catatonic state. Faculty members are called in for assistance, and they observe the spectacle disinterestedly, irked by the inconvenience. They taxonomize Alana as a “piece of office furniture.”
At this early point, Ives appears to be laying the groundwork for a well-trodden narrative. Synapses click; the book is filed under “institutional critique/satire” and “#MeToo.” Ives lampoons the ivory tower artfully, employing an arid humor appropriate for her self-serious subjects. (Here, she is aided by her own commanding C.V.: Harvard B.A., Iowa Writers’ Workshop M.F.A., and NYU Ph.D.) Dipping into the faculty members’ interiorities—their petty grievances and vain preoccupations—she extracts some snarky gems:
“Didn’t Isobel remember the days when he was trying to put together what was only the world’s wackiest seminar on neocon poetics, The Gold Standard: Metonymy as Money, that legendarily deranged offering?”
The professors’ indifference towards their students' well-being, of course, bespeaks the callousness of the academic institution at large: Fueled by a rapacious drive for profit, the university skimps on its faculty members, pitting them against one another for the scarce rewards on offer (tenure, mild-to-moderate fame). To Ives’ hardened professors, a sex scandal is just another tedious shuffle of paperwork.
Pivot to Erin, who is having a very bad time in her own right. The reader follows the protagonist as her ill-fated day bleeds into an endless—albeit less bad—night. After a slew of misfortunes—a bid for assistance shirked by her advisor, an explosive dinner with her dysfunctional parents, and, the kicker, the decision to divorce her unfaithful husband—Erin finds herself locked out of her apartment, taking stock of her bag’s contents.
As the action of the day unfolds, Ives constellates biographical information on her protagonist, presenting Erin’s emotional history: A New York native, Erin lived through 9/11 as an adolescent and subsequently lost full faculty over time and speech, sliding into an ambient dissociative state that periodically escalates into psychotic breaks. This state is in part willed—consciously reinforced in the wake of her first heartbreak. Although taken by Erin’s intelligence, her high school love interest ultimately rejected her, citing her aloof demeanor:
He told Erin that he knew that when she was an adult she would have a house and a room in the house that she would go to be alone, and that if he were in the house, her husband, she would always leave him for that room.
Upon receiving this damning charge, Erin sensed that something inside of her had irreparably broken. She vowed to extinguish her emotions for good, choosing a “clear, rational, good life in which feelings do not matter.” This response increases in density over time, through a college trip in which she is repeatedly raped and through the ongoing emotional abuse from her husband. As the fact of her husband’s betrayal floats through her consciousness, Erin soothes herself with the idea that she is “simply a brainstem on legs.”
By the close of this first section, “Paralysis,” the narrative has expanded beyond the confines of the academic institution and invites a psychological, diagnostic reading . . . a trauma plot! Trauma is indeed diffuse in Life Is Everywhere. Erin’s psychic disintegration coincides with the disintegration of life post–9/11, particularly within her city of residence: New York is a “hollow shell” of its former self, and its occupants obsess over images with newfound fervor, finding solace in the knowledge that “bombs were elsewhere.” Other horrific world historical events, such as the Holocaust and the Ottoman Christian Genocide, are referenced frequently but off-handedly. Although exterior to the narrative(s), these events are nonetheless inescapable and contribute to the characters’ (and the readers’) sense of ambient dread.
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Then the second act, “Interiors,” begins, and the book reinvents itself as a detective novel of sorts, offering an intermission from the primary narrative—an intermission which, at 250 pages, spans over half of the book. Ushered in by the Le Guin quote, the section consists of the items in Erin’s bag, which are presented to the reader as if they are pieces of evidence in an investigation: item “A,” “B,” “C,” and so on. Regarded together, the materials do seem to function as clues, insofar as they contain insights into Erin’s life and being that she deftly avoids off the page. As Erin herself says about her two novellas: “I have gone back and recoded my childhood, and I have gone ahead and seen what was to be.”
The first novella, Maison Close, portrays a destructive adolescent female friendship. In Ferrante-esque style, one friend (beautiful and vivacious with a strong misanthropic streak) chooses another (the plain, overlooked narrator) as her companion, confidant, and accomplice. In a reimagination of Hamlet, the former friend—named after Shakespeare’s titular anti-hero—urges the latter to kill her parents. The story is heavy with implications, an effect facilitated by its sparse, cool prose:
So Hamlet, a girl, restored me. She was the one who gave me something like a memory. Thank you, Hamlet. With you, my history begins.
If the story is to be understood as an autobiographical account of Erin’s childhood, then it is one heavily reworked, fever dream-style.
Her next novella, Hypergraphia, is more explicitly autobiographical. It is a true “speculative autofiction,” narrating Erin’s marriage to a manipulative, alcoholic serial cheater before she had actually discovered—or, at least, consciously acknowledged—her husband’s infidelities. Although the protagonist resembles Erin biographically and psychologically, she diverges from Erin in one notable regard: her refusal to write. She avoids the dangerous category that is “the artist” out of fear that she will succumb to her grandmother’s hypergraphia (compulsive writing). For the protagonist, art-making equals excess which equals madness, an idea further corroborated by her husband, whose manic venture into art-making correlates with his increased cruelty. By avoiding writing and all that writing symbolizes (expression, vitality, etc.), however, she locks herself into another sort of madness, one of negation.
Erin suffers from the same type of madness as her protagonist despite the fact that she does write; Erin’s husband is manipulative and unfaithful like the protagonist’s husband despite the fact that he isn’t an artist. These variations between narrative layers undermine any easy conclusions concerning the book’s stance on the relationship between art-making and madness/goodness. Writing may exhume the unconscious, but it is up to the writer to interpret and act upon the content unlocked.
Instead of writing, Hypergraphia’s protagonist concocts test questions. The novella echoes her occupation on a formal level, concluding many of its chapters with assessments. The reader is invited to choose interpretations of narrative points from a series of multiple choice questions. The options refer to, build off of, and dispute one another. Question: “The narrator’s interest in visual arts serves what purpose in the narrative?” Choice D: “It does not serve any purpose. It is included in the narrative because it exists.” There is no answer key.
Similarly, the materials in the bag—and the insights they reveal—do not ultimately cohere into an answer key for the primary narrative, introducing more questions and thematic threads than they address. The final section of the book, “Lives,” plops the reader back into Erin’s feverish night at the library, during which she conducts some investigative reading. She finds a paper by Herbsweet’s former “mentee” that disproves his dissertation (a florid, slipshod work on a fictional 19th century French author); Erin then translates the sole work by said author, half-believing that she alone is the intended audience. She also encounters the infamous Alana, who smugly reveals the current state of Herbsweet—that is, his transformation into a dog. Erin doesn’t seek an explanation for this surreal turn of events, and Alana doesn’t provide one. Regardless, the point is clear enough: The roles have reversed; the slave is now the master.
This reversal reads neither as a revenge fantasy nor as an attempt to add “nuance” to the #MeToo discourse. Rather, it offers a striking example of how storytelling fails to assimilate trauma into its structure. Erin remarks that despite her efforts “a narrative stubbornly clung to her feelings.” But what happens when those undesirable feelings become too much to bear? The story devolves into absurdity, shooting off in disparate directions, circling around itself, evading a clear chronology. As Freud dictated long ago, the repressed returns via symptoms. Ives illustrates this on the level of form: In Life Is Everywhere, the repressed returns via intertextuality. What cannot be accounted for within the primary plot resurfaces through a seemingly infinite efflux of referents, redactions, and reappropriations, as primarily evinced through the materials within Erin’s bag.
But this is not quite right either. Ives sculpts content in the service of formal experimentation, rather than the obverse (i.e., the trauma plot). This is a novel that intentionally courts a number of genres and voices, commiting to none. In her aborted afterword, Ives affirms the book’s promiscuity—its “rehearsal of genre as carefully strategized collapse, what might even be called literary weakness.” In fact, she had planned to write an entirely different novel but jettisoned the project, citing her inability to keep the “relationship between figure and ground in [her] speculative depictions stable.” Life Is Everywhere absorbed the original novel into its structure, wherein it figures as yet another micro-narrative.
The novel, then, is a container story on a metaphorical level too, eliding a satisfactory (definitive, evaluative) resolution and category, inviting nested texts and ideas to interact in ways that are “particular and powerful”—if also dizzying and opaque—instead.
For Erin, writing is less a therapeutic tool than an ontological necessity, a way to contain swirling ambiguities. She doesn’t experience the liberatory promise of catharsis upon completing her novellas, remaining lodged in disaffection and uncertainty through to the end. She is not elevated to heroic heights. Still, she stands by her decision to write:
It was perhaps better to have written such things, as opposed to not to have, in order to have something to stand on. The alternative was, of course, the void. It was a very bad idea, Erin knew, to try to stand on that.
This, if anything, is what the novel offers by way of consolation and conclusion. There is value in recording and speculating as part of an ongoing process, to devoutly assert that “life is everywhere”—indexed and reconstructed, ad infinitum, like a body of knowledge tended by a stream of academics.