Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World

by Lucy Ives

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593763909
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

…a clever new satire of writing programs…Ives may relish breaking the rules of realism, but she breaks the rules of comic novels, too, when she insists that her losers win.

The New York Times Book Review - Caleb Crain

★ 03/04/2019

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)

Publishers Weekly

An American Booksellers Association Indie Next Selection

“This clever satire of writing programs exhibits, with persuasive bitterness, the damage wreaked by the idea that literature is competition.” ––The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"Funny, cerebral . . . Ives’s hyperbolic satire—her outsized, loquacious characters, her stylistic brio—lays bare the central fallacy of 'write what you know.' In one sense, we believe Ives is drawing from her own, all-too-real experience. And yet, with its ludic meta-fictionality and the self-conscious construction of characters, the novel cleverly dodges knowable reality, circumventing the question of authenticity altogether.” ––Hermione Hoby, The New Yorker

"Ives is either puncturing a myth about Iowa or advancing it; either option makes her book an indulgence . . . Ives’s interests point toward the philosophical, even the mystical. Loudermilk is not just funny; it becomes a layered exploration of the creative process . . . Ives approaches the students themselves with canny tenderness, and their work (which the novel excerpts, delightfully) with grave respect. Her own language is prickly and odd, with a distracted quality, as if she were trying to narrate while another voice is murmuring in her ear.” ––Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

"A clever new satire of writing programs . . . Ives scores some fine touches.” ––Caleb Crain, The New York Times Book Review

"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.” ––Rebekah Frumkin, The Washington Post

“A narrative in defense of narrative . . . In a literary critical flourish, [Ives] combines elements of libertine novels, realist novels, social novels, inherited wealth lit, postmodern novels, period pieces, poetry, satire, and revenge plots . . . A funny and cutting novel whose critiques of inherited wealth and its effects on culture in the aughts will keep being true until a full redistribution of wealth, beginning with reparations, occurs.” ––Charlie Markbreiter, The Nation

“A cutting, sparkling new novel from Lucy Ives . . . As Ives tells the story of Loudermilk and Harry, and the assorted people they encounter on campus, it becomes clear that she is telling the story of art, of self-invention, of libertines, of culture, of America. Needless to say, things get dark. And yet, it never gets so dark that you can't see what's right in front of you, in all of its tragic hilarity: the truth of what America is at its very worst and its very best—which, as it turns out, are pretty much the same thing.” ––Kristin Iversen, NYLON

"Ives' 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 . . . Laugh-out-loud funny and rife with keen cultural observations, Ives’ tale is a gloriously satisfying critique of education and creativity.” ––Booklist (starred review)

"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.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Half gonzo grad school satire featuring these two princes among men, half theoretical inquiry into the nature of writing and reality . . . Wonder Boys meets Cyrano de Bergerac meets Jacques Lacan meets Animal House. Something for everyone.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-02-04

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. Loudermilk—poems 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Joel Froomkin’s devil-may-care tone perfectly matches the attitude of tall, fair-haired, charismatic Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a young man who wins a prestigious poetry scholarship even though he has never written a poem. In this comic novel, Ives pulls back the curtain on higher education, revealing the scam that people can be taught to write and the calcified bureaucracy that allows banality to be praised while real talent is hidden. Luckily, Loudermilk’s best friend, Harry Rego, can write, and that’s what he does while Loudermilk trolls for coeds. Froomkin lets Ives’s observational humor shine through his pacing, keeping the listener chuckling and sometimes laughing out loud. The audiobook’s comedy comes from the 2000s “dude” culture embodied in Froomkin’s daffy performance, which bounces from one weird scene to the next. R.O. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile