When Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie came out last year, I was inundated with essays that analyzed the film’s joys, flaws, and gender politics. They often did so using a popular formula: mix high culture and low—children’s toys with critical theory—to reveal the ideology behind a “cursed work,” one that is flawed, but glamorously so. Many of those essays, I’ll confess, didn’t sustain my attention. But I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee—even though she deploys similar tactics and theorists. What makes her approach feel so novel, so fun?
The five essays in An Image of My Name Enters America often take children’s pop culture artifacts, like My Little Pony and The Little Mermaid, and complicate them by applying a historical and critical lens. But the essays don’t feel didactic, because Ives makes her arguments using an appealingly roundabout path. An essay about childbirth and the cruel history of obstetrics takes multiple detours into sci-fi critique, from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem to Claire Denis’s film High Life. The first sentence of the book is about Ives’s pregnancy, the last sentence about her son’s birth—the trip there, however, involves excursions into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms, teenage crushes, and the concept of irony. Ives’s strategy, she explains, is to pursue her interests wherever they lead. “It’s like a little ball I toss. It flies from my hand, soft yet determined; knocks against some surface at a distance, plunk.”
Throughout, Ives is disarmingly irreverent: Friedrich Nietzsche is “modernity’s most famous depressive,” and the New York Times article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” is “head-in-sand, cozy self-improvement” for romantics.
But Ives is serious when discussing historical injustices and infantilizing contemporary delusions—including her own. In “Earliness, or Romance,” Ives shows how fantasies of heterosexual love and family are yoked to America’s violent settlement of the West. Artifacts she examines include the educational game The Oregon Trail and the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which depicts, to use Ives’s cheerfully online phrase, “#cottagecore avant la lettre.” Ives invokes two patron saints of literary analysis, Sigmund Freud and Lauren Berlant, to argue that our dreams of a perfect, self-actualizing romance are inevitably compromised by the past: namely, parental dysfunction and social inequality. Where’s the escape hatch? In lieu of prescriptive advice, Ives offers a “love bib” (as in, bibliography) from A to Z (Arendt to Žižek).
Ives, who teaches at Brown, moves nimbly between a professorial tone and the naive, earnest voice of a student. In “The End,” she deftly narrates her undergraduate years—describing them with vivid, nearly filmic detail, alongside the history of French post-structuralist theory in America. The waning influence of theory in literary academia is a recurring concern of Ives’s, but her effortless descriptions of Lacanian literary analysis make this past feel—well, not quite so past. By including voyeuristic details, like Lacan’s extravagant laundry habits while visiting America, Ives turns imposing scholars into winsome characters.
There are certain through lines in the collection. One is Ives’s interest in imagistic language. At the turn of the millennium, when Ives was in college, she took a leave of absence, flew to Los Angeles, and drove up and down the Californian coastline, “spooked by the ubiquitous image culture of America and simultaneously in awe.” That reverential disquiet hasn’t left her; each essay preoccupies itself with depicting this strange, compromised country. The other through line is Ives’s tenacious critical gaze. By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it’s a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It’s painful to let go of these delusions; it’s also the only way to go on. “I wake up after dreaming such a dream,” she writes about her disillusionment with modern romantic love, “and have to go on living. That is the funny thing about dwelling here in the wreckage.” In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice—lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming.
Publisher: Graywolf Press Page count: 336 Price: $20.00 Key quote: “I comforted myself, attempting to believe my impulsivity and dilettantism were somehow modernist.” Shelve next to: Moyra Davey, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson Unscientifically calculated reading time: One cross-country flight, or two with in-flight TV intermissions
