A Technique for Managing the Obliteration of My Self
James Webster reviews Lucy Ives’s essay collection “An Image of My Name Enters America.”
By James Webster • October 19, 2024
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives. Graywolf Press, 2024. 336 pages.
ALONGSIDE HER WORK as a poet, novelist, curator, critic, and professor, the writer Lucy Ives has always been sort of a sly historian. Two of her novels are set at pivotal moments in American history. Her 2019 novel Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World is set in the fever-stricken year of 2003, amid the mania of the early “War on Terror,” which lurks constantly in the background. Similarly, her astonishing 2022 novel Life Is Everywhere takes place in November 2014, at the end of an era of American complacency. The settings of these novels are rarely acknowledged by the characters in them, but Ives trusts readers to understand, even subconsciously, how these very deliberate period pieces are influenced by the grander history that is always unspooling above the petty concerns of the writers, academics, and assorted other neurotics that populate her books. With her first essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America (2024), she moves this same sort of role as cultural meteorologist to the forefront, applying it to a range of subjects, including herself.
It’s a heavy word, but I am going to use it anyway: for the uninitiated, Lucy Ives is a genius. If I fail to convince you, perhaps you can ask any of her other devoted acolytes. I have no doubt that they would excitedly corroborate that she is one of the most thrilling writers that the United States has produced so far this century. Multiple blurbs adorning the outside of Image also rush to laud the power of her intellect and her showstopping stylistic talent.
More than that, Ives is an old-fashioned, big-picture, deep-thinking type of writer. Her work often tilts toward the conceptual, in conversation with the structurally innovative fictions of the 20th century. Ives is part of a vanishing breed of writers who seem to care more about writing than about being read. She is concerned with the limitations of literary institutions in fostering the future of the written word. She is concerned with the novel as a medium, pushing the boundaries of how it is possible to tell a story (Image, as a nonfiction collection, takes the opportunity to indulge in some footnote high jinks à la David Foster Wallace). She is the sort of writer who makes you wonder what, exactly, everyone else has been doing when this has been possible the entire time.
Image is a startling and disarming read in which the author descends from the realms of metafiction. Rather than asking us to join her inside a matryoshka-doll novel, or a funhouse-mirror story collection, she takes us instead on a more familiar journey, though a collection of essays with semifrequent line breaks. The five pieces freewheel across genre lines, ricocheting from critical theory to personal memoir to pop culture analysis to arcane archival research.
This type of book has gained popularity over the last decade, and you have no doubt read at least one of them. They have been featured on “best books of the 21st century” lists. I have seen them referred to as “The Maggie Nelson Industrial Complex.” They’ve been the subject of jokes and tweets, such as this one, posted by the novelist Jake Wolff:
Creative nonfiction writers be like:
I first ate a hotdog when I was six years old. I remember the taste, the scent, the summer.
SECTION BREAK
Hot dogs were invented in 1693 by Steven Hotdog. According to Scientific American, the hotdog is
I will admit, that’s pretty on the nose—but just because the approach, mixing the personal with the cultural/historical, is so familiar does not inherently render the method stale or otherwise suspect. Make no mistake here: Ives remains a formidable, high-performance writer, and Image is a thorny book—even with a vehicle chosen for our comfort. I read it through twice before I found myself capable of describing it without resorting to blurb-baiting metaphors. The longer I sat with these essays, they began to slip through the net of easy superlatives, settling into something rich, complex, and satisfying. The book’s depth seems to grow beneath you, the way the bottom of a swimming pool slopes gently downward. To me, this seems Ives’s intent.
As readers, we have gotten to know Lucy Ives as a exceptional writer, but in this new book, we are invited to meet Lucy Ives the person. An Image of My Name Enters America finds the author setting out to research and reveal herself. The essays confirm certain details readers may have been able to extrapolate—mostly minor revelations, such as the fact that her mother was employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the backdrop for Ives’s debut novel, Impossible Views of the World (2017). She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the setting for her barbed second novel, Loudermilk. She was married, and then divorced, while living in Ridgewood, Queens, and has spent lots of time at NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, facts that form the backbone of Life Is Everywhere. Image is a wide-ranging collection, but it is also clearly a book about Lucy Ives as much as it is about unicorns, Cold War musicals, the Assyrian genocide, or any of the purported subjects of the essays. If this is not a memoir smuggled in through a side door, it is at least an opportunity for recognition of the woman beneath the mask.
This distance between perception and reality is one of the book’s central preoccupations. Like a family tree branching off from a single root, essays that might otherwise seem disparate and disjointed all stem outward from this same point. Even the book’s cover—with its title on the horizon, casting an inverse shadow across the foreground—suggests duality. Like Plato’s cave, the shadow is a mere approximation of the thing, but it is the one we are more familiar with.
In one of the essays, Ives actually expresses her desire to live “alone in a cave,” a thought that she suddenly pursues with the “ardor of a fanatic,” until a conversation with a colleague brings her back to earth. The essays are full of moments like this, where Ives’s mind will arc like a bolt from a mad scientist’s coil, connecting with the nearest object and suffusing it with life, only for the spark to disappear as quickly as it came. Writing, as we will see, is a way for Ives to preserve this spark, or at least to inhabit the moment of its impact just long enough to demonstrate its power through language.
And oh, what language it is! On the page, Ives remains a virtuoso, inventive and agile. Yet without the formal experimentation that marks much of her other work, Image takes on a casual familiarity. Here, she writes the way that she talks—the tone is conversational, digressive, intelligent, and perceptibly anxious. Her references careen from the obvious to the archaic but are always smartly deployed in service of the essay’s broader topics.
The book’s first essay, “Of Unicorns,” is an exemplary cross section. In the essay, Ives wrestles with Pliny the Elder, a childhood field trip, the mythology of the My Little Pony franchise, and medieval tapestry weaving, before finally arriving at unicorns. But even upon reaching its destination, the essay is only about unicorns on the surface level. Really, it’s about growing up. It’s about the glittering promise, and subsequent disappointment, of the Reagan years. It’s about realizing that magic does not exist in quite the ways you thought it did. And it’s a perfect introduction to the book: the subject is accessible, but the approach is dense—the essay is lightweight but airtight.
The book’s title essay is similarly multifaceted. On the surface, it is about “Ives” as a last name and about her family’s emigration to the United States in the early 20th century. She wonders about her family’s forgotten history, lost on the far side of the Assyrian genocide, which bifurcates the family tree like a freeway through a neighborhood. She focuses on the ways that a name, a simple word, can connect her to a real, tangible history, and meditates on what it means to be born into a family, and how she feels about choosing a new one. It is an essay about her relationship with herself and her shitty ex, and the way she thinks about her place in the world.
We are still in the warm-up period at this point. Ives is checking her instruments, the meters and readings. In the next essay, we read about romance, accompanying Ives through her teenage years in the late 1990s. We stop to meditate on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a bonkers film from 1954. We remember the beige plastic of the bygone computer labs. We read about Ives’s “proto-emo” sense of style, versus the decidedly more mainstream dress worn by her best friend, with whom Ives has one of those disquietingly intense relationships. It is one of those friendships that are claustrophobic in their closeness because you do not yet realize that you are in love. Often, you will be the last one to learn something important about yourself.
Once you reach “The End,” the book’s shattering centerpiece, Ives finally, gloriously, lets loose. Subdividing the essay into 26 sections, one for each letter of the alphabet, Ives honeycombs her way through eschatology, 19th-century American Protestantism, her undergrad romance with a graduate student that was as tepid as it was doomed, her conflicting feelings of reverence and jealousy toward a mentor, and, finally, a sort of linguistic-philosophy-inspired breakdown in which she goes for months without speaking and (sort of) steals a car. The essay begins with a recurring dream about tornadoes, as if anticipating the work being described as “tornadic.”
As she acknowledges in “The End,” Ives considers the act of writing, the use of language, as an avenue to escape into something larger than herself. As a writer, you can think inside someone else’s head. “By way of the eyes, words go inside, hover, remain,” she writes at the outset of the “E” subdivision. Living in the thoughts of others is an unbelievably seductive idea for Ives, who is perennially skeptical of institutions, always preferring individuals.
She has been foreshadowing this distrust through all of the earlier essays—and her entire body of work, in fact. On the book’s second page, she mentions her skepticism of Abrahamic religions. Citing the “ecstatic suspension” required by a heaven in the sky, Ives explains her discomfort in a parenthetical: “(I’m afraid of heights).” It’s a small but understandably human fear that separates her from the divine. Magic has failed her, romance has failed her, institutions have failed her. So what is left but direct intervention? She can create these perfect images in her mind, but how can you impart them to the reader one-to-one?
The solution is having each lettered subdivision in “The End” begin with a scattershot of free-association: “P is for Perfume and it is for person. P is for paces and perfection. Pores. P is for Poe. Purloined. Peace! Police! Purple prose. It’s for poetry, a hook or spoon or spade.” Not necessarily tables of contents for the essay’s upcoming sections, these lists are suggestions for further reading, or rabbit holes for the reader to tumble down at their own discretion. It’s as if Ives is handing you bullet points and turning you loose into a whirlpool.
Normally, when we speak about interiority in writing, it is about a place inside ourselves—a world of feelings, of abstraction and intuition. But Ives makes it a much more material, almost physical space—trying to fit so much into the interior that things end up jammed into odd and uncomfortable angles. “Death = being completely inside one’s own head,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Life = the world.” Ives seems to agree, though she never puts it quite so bluntly.
Maybe, in an ideal world, Lucy Ives would be a library, and all of these thoughts and ideas could be shelved neatly inside her brain. Unfortunately for her, she is merely human, and she learns to split the difference by writing. By the conclusion of “The End,” she returns to herself after a dissociative road trip up the California coastline. She goes back to school. She finishes her studies. Writing becomes “a technique for managing the obliteration of [her] self.” She goes on to be a cult-favorite writer of fiction, poetry, and essays who teaches at several universities and gives birth to her son during a global pandemic.
An Image of my Name Enters America is a book driven by curiosity. It’s a celebration of questions rather than the didactic results of scattered research projects. It’s a vulnerable book, occasionally messy, and sometimes distractible. It is also deeply and profoundly humane. Over the course of five essays, the reader comes to understand that Lucy Ives is not attempting to showcase herself as some sort of all-knowing polymath. If anything, she spends the book pressed up against her limitations, straining against the fact that, no matter how hard she tries, she does not, cannot, know everything. That, too, is something to be learned.
