There’s a familiar refrain from an older generation speaking to a younger one: Why isn’t there any good music these days? It’s often posed like that, as a question, and accompanied by an insincere request for the younger to show the older something good. I can expect to hear it every holiday when I hop between gatherings for each of my parents, extended family, and my partner’s family. They all seem to imply that I am the resident musical expert and might hold an answer as to where the good music is, but that’s not what any of them mean. They all want affirmation that their era — the ’70s or ’80s — was the true peak of culture. None of them see parallels to complaints about synthesizers or rock and roll from their own parents.
Not enough is written, in this critic’s estimation, about how our eliminations are described and theorized, and loved and loathed, in fiction and poetry. Their “here we are again” inevitability adds chaos, comedy, disgust, shame, irony, urgency and anguish to narrative. They drive action. They are life, as much as sex is life — maybe more so, because people’s sex lives dwindle but this need does not. Fiction that avoids or denies feces, Milan Kundera has written, is kitsch.
What is the point of communicating if no one is willing to hear you—if people talk over you, negate you, subtract you from whichever room you’re in? Lucy Ives’s latest novel, Life Is Everywhere introduces us to the protagonist, Erin Adamo, on page 40, lets us spend some time with her, then directs our attention to the contents of her bag for 250 pages before returning us to her life. By the time Erin enters the story, we have already read a 14-page history of botulinum toxin and spent a while in the perspectives of substitute professor Faith Ewer and Faith’s nemesis and co-teacher, Isobel Childe. So when Erin first appears, we expect her to recede again, which is what everyone else expects of her.
But Erin lingers, irritating several characters throughout the book. No one seems to enjoy contending with her presence. They want her gone as quickly as possible, or to be someone else, or a blank slate to reflect the self-affirming story of their own superior intelligence, worldliness, style, etc. When Erin visits her parents, they’re furious that their guest is Erin and not Erin’s husband—but they’re also delighted to have an emotional punching bag. Characters are repeatedly enraged by Erin’s lack of presence, which just makes them want to squash her flatter, into nothing. How can Erin possibly communicate if she is negated every time she tries? How could anyone?
In Joanne, the author gives us a sympathetic protagonist and an observant narrator who is attentively attuned to the natural landscape: the storm clouds above the lake resemble “bright florets of cauliflower” and the sky is ignited by “the apricot fire of sunrise”.
Through the prism of the claustrophobic Kettle Lake, Hurtubise, with poise and insight, traces how her characters are haunted by their pasts and devastated by the pain of loss.
“Raw Dog,” however, becomes clever and most interesting as Loftus reflects upon society, relationships, and why the hell she came up with this idea in the first place, which was partly due to COVID. She’s funny, sincere, and all too willing to share what hot dogs can do to a human body in both the literal sense as well as the psychological sense as her relationship with her boyfriend slowly erodes to nothing more than a “we have to drive back to L.A. together at some point so we are stuck in this hot dog hell limbo until that time arrives. Did the dog poop again? It’s your turn to clean it up.”
I watch the winding creek.
There’s a body
knows how to catch light.