This week we’re continuing on with our serialized release of a paper by Indirect Books Publisher—and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor—Dan White. Originally written for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago last month, the essay considers the form of the novel over the long 20th Century, specifically looking at the legacy of Modernism and its current status today. Does Modernism continue to exist, or have terms such as New Modernism properly replaced it in the ongoing understanding of what the novel can be? If you missed Part I, check out here; or Part II, here.
“The Novel, Perpetual: Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form” will be published in the Summer 2026 Quarterly of L’Esprit, after being realised in four parts here on the Substack. The essay examines Lucy Ives’ novel Life is Everywhere, along with her essay “The Weak Novel,” which is particularly apt as we enter the finalist stage of our Clarissa Dalloway Prize, judged by Lucy herself.
Part III gets further into textual analysis of Life is Everywhere, along with setting us up to return to our central questions in the final section. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much for your support!
The Novel, Perpetual:
Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form
D. W. White
III. The Bag
What Ives gets so correct her novel is that artistic vision mentioned earlier. This, I am coming to think, is the most important thing for an artist to possess; maybe we can call it spirit. I’d like to indulge in an anecdote for a moment. Recently, at one of the presses where I work, our prose team was discussing a manuscript submission, one that tried something very radical in structure and technique, and didn’t quite manage to pull it off, despite our interest in the idea. The team was attempting to figure out what exactly wasn’t working, and I mentioned the example of Life is Everywhere, of which the manuscript (very broadly) reminded. Why does one succeed and one not, even through they are both roughly equivalent in “how experimental” they are? I think the answer might be this idea of vision, of the completeness with which an artist first sees and can then realize, her art-object.
Of course this has a lot to do with talent, and other ephemera of life’s vagaries. But reading Life is Everywhere one gets the sense that, despite the wildness and the weakness, there is purpose to the novel: the person writing knows what she’s doing. Even, and especially, if we can’t see it for long stretches of page:
Erin’s mother was turning now to the dietary preferences of Ben’s family. She wanted to articulate just what it was they didn’t eat. She wanted to be exact, sociological.
Erin’s father did not like this. It was not just that he abhorred lists, parataxis, any scenario in which items gathered, free from hierarchy; he was not invited to this topic and therefore he did not matter.
Now Erin’s father said, “Erin doesn’t know anything about what they eat.”
“Yes, she does,” said Erin’s mother.
Below the table, the tortoiseshell cat wound itself around legs and feet. Erin thought, the mouth of a cat is used for cleaning, eat-ing, breathing, yawning, self-defense, abstract vocalizations. Erin thought, the mouth of a human is used for eating, breathing, yawning, speech, along with other emanations, and sex. Cats carry their young in their mouths, thought Erin. (84-85)
The flowing rigidity of the prose, with its encyclopedic bent and amused, insouciant, slightly in-on-the-joke slant, constitutes the novel beyond simply elaborating the events as they occur. Of course in one sense this is true of all books, but a loose commonality among Modernist fiction is the way in which the textures and specificities of their language—the linguistic surface—are themselves part of what the novel is, and what it is saying about the world. Again we have here the contrast between communication and expression; where the former prioritizes getting the point across (because the focus is on the entertainment value of the plot), the latter chooses carefully its words, because its words are itself.
Erin Adamo is a deeply realized character, and yet we strongly feel that the narration is looking at her somewhat askance. The scene with her parents is an important one thematically in setting up much of the middle of the book—which contains Erin’s own found writings, dealing with similar topics—but also does little, in the workshop sense, for the plot; we never see the parents again, and the novel doesn’t worry about their character arcs. More broadly, in a novel that spends hundreds of pages on embedded, doubly-fictitious writings by characters some of whom we never meet in the narrative, that sense of artistic vision is what sustains the reader, like being driven in a fast car late at night, a confidence in itself as a novel, one that it knows where it’s going.
It’s a tricky book to quote for this essay, because we’re talking about large formal structures most of all, which I can only explain (and not show). There are several tables of contents, attribution and copyright pages, epigraphs, a random page of a notebook, the prenominate electricity bill. It is a kind of madness. These things, along with the perspicacity and verve of Ives’ writing, make it exceedingly clear that what Life is Everywhere is interested in is the form of the novel, in language and its relationship to ourselves, in structures that permeate existence, or possibly do not exist. What it is not super interested in, is the plot of its elusive protagonist. We see Erin at the beginning and at the end, and of course we read a novel and a novella by her, which has the paradoxical effect of giving her character that richness which is so often sought, and missed, by more conventional writing. This is something Ives hit on in her second novel, Loudermilk, and while she didn’t invent the maneuver, it clearly sits on the leading edge of what’s currently being done in fiction. I’ll have more to say about this last point in the final section of this paper; for now I’d like to try and illustrate Life is Everywhere’s internal logic by studying Erin’s own first-person writings, which fit with that of the base heterodeigetic narration as variation on a theme:
I’ve never tried to tell this story. I’ve told plenty of other ones—and, to almost anyone who would listen, especially once I got divorced — but never this one. The reason I haven’t tried is that I’m not sure that it’s a story. It’s like I’ve removed myself from so many of the scenes and so effectively, that although I know what happened I’m not sure what relationship I myself have to the events. It’s like I’m floating on the ceiling, I’m sitting on the bookshelf, I’m laid out underneath the kitchen table, I’m tucked into a drawer—and I’m not that person, I’m not that person there who lives and speaks the words.
The other major problem with the story is that it does not begin. I’m going to try to talk to you about it, but it doesn’t have a proper beginning…
I wrote a novella for my high school English teacher. He was fifty-one, a charismatic burnout with whom I was in love…In the Middle Ages he would likely have attempted to impregnate me (using wiles, as I imagined it, rather than brute force). But for now, for the short duration of this modern life, he examined my language. His mind was a soup he lavished on us all. We were his students. He had not become a novelist. (19-21 [225-227])
Erin’s taxonomic staccato is similar to that of the narrating entity earlier, while her pathos bleeds out a bit more freely in the first person, blending the base narration’s remove with her own total lack of assertion among a quiet self-assurance. The “found-writing” technique works best as something like panopticonic observation of a given character; instead of sitting down for an entire book with her in a room, we see Erin from several angles, both in-scene (in the third person) and by reading her own writings. As in life, this proves a great way to get to know someone. In that sense, the embedded writing method is a prime example of showing over telling, one enacted at the structural level, and as form.
It’s also at times funny, surprising, jaunty, sad. All the things we’d like novels to do; this is the point. We as humans have an indelible, primordial relationship with language, and the novel, as a linguistic art form, is meant to celebrate and cultivate that connection. We can see this type of play with language all over High Modernist fiction, and likewise in Modernism of the current day; I find that type of jouissance rather less evident in the type of mainstream literature discussed above. Form, though, can mean many things, from narration to structure to character to scene. It has to do with how the novel is constructed, less so with what happens in it. This compositional rigor is difficult, for both the reader and writer (although always difficult-with-purpose), and has been with us, whether in the shadows or in the sun, for all of the long twentieth century.
Thanks for reading. Come back next week for the closing Part IV—and in the meantime, stay critical!