Loudermilk

Starred review from March 4, 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.

February 15, 2019
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.

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Starred review from April 1, 2019
Ives' (Impossible Views of the World, 2017) 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 (the Iowa Writers' Workshop isn't named but is repeatedly called to mind). The trick is, Loudermilk hasn't written a poem in his life: Harry, an agoraphobic abnormal-psych major, pens every poem Loudermilk brings to class. As Loudermilk romps about campus, tearing through sororities and navigating the egos of alcoholic writing instructors (and their wives and daughters), Harry toils over the typewriter, generating hit after hit that deftly capture the ethos of the 2003, "mission accomplished" era. But the jig could never last. Behind Loudermilk and Harry is a small cast of incredibly fleshed-out characters. Readers meet Anton, a Silicon Valley success looking to reconnect to the humanities; Clare, the daughter of a literary legend hoping to carve a canonical place for herself; and the Hillarys, husband-and-wife professors, both with their vices, plus their teenage daughter, Lizzie, a tortured counterculturist hell-bent on bedding Loudermilk. Laugh-out-loud funny and rife with keen cultural observations, Ives' tale is a gloriously satisfying critique of education and creativity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)