Seeing Scenes: Ben Fama Reviews Lucy Ives's The Hermit

Ben Fama wrote a review of Lucy Ives's newest, The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016), for The Culture Trip. "Much of The Hermit regards the conceptualization of literature as novelistic. It’s even possible to look at The Hermit as a novel, which includes both characters and plot."

The dark heart of The Hermit is split in two sections. The first is introduced “At the end of her unfinished novel, a strange art object appears.” What follows is a long vignette, a detailed description of a wooden cube carved with figuration in relief displaying civilization as it stands—a line of dancing creatures, carnivalesque in their domestic animation—as well as various symbols of agriculture and tools that humanity has been built upon. This is followed by a depiction of a hermit, wandering the ruins of a once-golden empire, “grim reminders of human law and folly.” Finally, natures beautifully resumes, in the form of a natural spring.

The second section is study of a character, Nancy Thompson, from A Nightmare on Elm Street, who, in the author’s words, is secluded in a place of psychological horror and physical violence. Her self-enforced seclusion saves her life, and Ives confesses to understanding this character, a function of narrative she describes elsewhere as “the bait of recognition.” “A white home, mint mansard, ivy browning on a trellis. Shade in foreground. Branches pendant with parasitic vines.” Ives baits us into a good-faith reading with this pleasing establishing shot. This section is also the one where she addresses an other in second person: “before I met you,”— another baited trap.

There is levity among the denser sections. In one note, a dream, Charles Olson presses his semi-erection through his jeans against the author’s face, who reports smelling detergent. In another she describes the inability of novelist Michel Houellebecq to offer commentary in his work, saying he only portrays events in themselves. To Ives this may not be a criticism, who says later, “One must work, perhaps for some time, to see scenes.”

Read the full piece here.