Life Is Everywhere

I think I could craft an argument for rating this book every gradiation above the one I have given it. In fact, I wonder, if I were smarter, or perhaps more patient, would this be an unabashed five star read?

The general consensus around this novel is clear. It is a victim of an intentional kind of unfocus. Structurally, it is a novel that presses pause on the action for around 250 pages, the bulk of the text, offering a quasi-character driven rounding out of the themes, world, and cast. These diversions are clearly necessary, in fact, due to the sheer amount of space they take up, they are in many ways the whole point of the work, but that doesn't mean the act of actually reading them doesn't occasionally become frustrating.

I respect the endeavour, but I can't say I always enjoyed it. There is a pervasive notion that the protaganist, and, in many ways, the author, are tiptoeing around saying certain things aloud, creating recurvsive loops, spirals, that the patient reader will eventually follow to the kernel of truth at the center. It is a potent idea, creating experientally this very modern-feeling anxious thought pattern, the things we talk about, the things we don't say that we hope our loved ones can find by reading between our lines, it even calls to mind the younger generation's self-censorship on social media, the dulling of oneself, of life's sharper edges, in pursuit of algorithmic purity. There's a lot you can pull out here if you look for it, big ticket themes, gender roles, misogyny, immigration, isolation, abuse, trauma and assault, dysfunctional families, academia, art, history, art history, its all there for you to discover.

A recurring motif is the sculpture in Life is Everywhere, so I want you to consider a block of marble. Now, when you read a book by a clearly brilliant writer, you want them to take the block of marble that is language and build you a sculpture. Instead, Lucy Ives has built you a block of marble. She hands you a photograph, lets you look at it for maybe five minutes, and then pulls it away. It is your job to do the work, to experience the frustration of writing, the frustration of finding the emotional center of whatever story you are compelled to pull from the many threads Life is Everywhere offers you, to choose whether to work with that photograph you glimpsed at the start or to ignore it. At the end she's going to hand you the photo again, and you get to see how your work stacks up. It's interesting, it's bold, it's definitely genius, but it is kind of exhausting.