Rebekah Frumkin Reviews Lucy Ives's Loudermilk

At the Washington Post, Rebekah Frumkin explains, "Ives’s hilarious novel 'Loudermilk or The Real Poet or The Origin of the World' borrows its premise from Edmond Rostand’s 'Cyrano de Bergerac' — and, according to Ives, Steve Martin’s 1987 rom-com 'Roxanne.' But it’s much more than a retelling of the familiar tale in which a homely poet writes verse to be recited by a clueless hunk." From there: 

It’s a farce about the struggle to make honest, unadulterated art in a market-driven world. Poetry, long thought to be the product of creative purity — and almost anti-capitalist in its unmarketability — becomes a tool for deception and self-promotion in Ives’s capable hands.

Our Cyrano is Harry Rego, a shy poet who is described by a fellow writer as “a kind of humanoid lemur or gentle bat-boy hybrid.” Harry is maladapted to nearly every social situation he finds himself in, and often has to rely on his best friend, the charismatic Troy Loudermilk, to translate his grunts and stutters. Loudermilk is a student in the Seminars, an MFA program in the fictional no-man’s land of Crete, Iowa. (The program is not dissimilar from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which Ives attended.) Harry is along for the ride.

For Loudermilk, whose life is a clownish exercise in long-form improv, getting into an MFA program becomes an ambition. “Do you have any idea how many people are into this? Somebody could totally run this scene,” he tells Harry. The idea that Harry will write the poetry and Loudermilk will be the face of the poetry is born shortly thereafter.

Read on at the Washington Post.