Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives
A review of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives.
Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives (2019). Published by Soft Skull Press.
The writing MFA. People tend to have mixed thoughts about its existence, about whether it should be a requirement to quote-on-quote make it in the world. My personal opinion, after experiencing what I have as a writer from a young age, is that the MFA is a form of gatekeeping. The average person cannot afford an MFA because of the sunk costs that come with it. In a capitalist society, money is survival and the MFA isn’t very safe, especially when you largely need a PhD to teach at state schools nowadays.
Loudermilk is a satire, choosing to thinly disguise the Iowa Writers Workshop and turn it into a spectacle. Our main character is a frat boy named Loudermilk, who, with the help of his shy, mousy friend, cons his way into the Workshops. Loudermilk is rich and talentless, knows nothing about poetry and the way it works. But by plagiarizing his way in via money, he makes it into the best writing program in the country. And, having been to Iowa, I’m not surprised this tale exists. Let’s continue to the review.
Book Blurb
It’s the end of summer, 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished and the unemployment rate is at its highest level in years. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.
However, Loudermilk has never written a poem in his life.
For all Troy Loudermilk is—and, in the eyes of his fellow students and instructors, he is many things: a cipher to be solved, a hero to be championed, a rival to be disgraced—a poet he most certainly is not.
Wonderfully sly and wickedly entertaining, Loudermilk is a social novel for our times—a subversive look at the pieties of contemporary literature and the institutions that sustain them.
Content
Disclaimer: I have been to Iowa City to study creative writing before, and have met many people for the Iowa Writers Workshop. The consensus seems to be that Iowa is extremely white and skewers towards rich people who can afford certain luxuries when it comes to writing. And I think this novel does a perfect job satirizing that, especially since the author, Lucy Ives, got her MFA from the workshops. She knows y’all. It’s all a farce.
And it shows how the MFA system breaks you down. The real poets are cast to the side and are relatively unknown for the rest of their lives, while the fakers, like Loudermilk, will always be a spectacle and hailed as a messiah of sorts. Everyone worships him throughout the novel, wants to know what his thought process is and how he acts the way he does. But, at the end of the day, this guy literally has never written a poem in his life, let alone a creative sentence. He’s the epitome of fake it till you make it, but has the cash to back it up as well.
We also get a bunch of side characters that fall into very specific tropes throughout the novel. There’s Clare, the fiction writer who can’t actually write anything to save her life. She is writer’s block personified. Clare just kind of exists in the book, although we get a good chunk of her narrative in the text. She doesn’t have much relevance to the plot itself, she’s just kind of there.
I have to applaud Ives at the end of the day; satire and humor is extremely hard to write, and although this book covers very niche humor (like you have to get it to get it), she does it pretty well. We do indeed hate Loudermilk throughout, or the annoying teenage girl who keeps throwing herself at him. You can have some empathy for characters, especially as a writer, because many of us have been there before and truly understand these situations.
Overall Thoughts
This novel definitely is for a specific niche, whether it’s writers in general, those with MFAs, or the publishing industry (or all of the above), I don’t know. You’re not going to get all of these characters and these tropes if you’ve never encountered them in yourself or in the wild. It’s a humorous satire, a bit over the top at times, but that’s kind of the point at the end of the day. You’re not supposed to like a good chunk of these people. But, unfortunately, they do exist in the world, especially in the MFA arena.
