Staff Pick
Troy Augustus Loudermilk is on to something when he realizes there is money to be made and girls to be had in the poetry racket. All he needs to secure a spot in the prestigious Seminars is the ghostwriting help of his asocial friend Harry... sound familiar? It's as though our fabulously named, conspicuously handsome hero has stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog (this is 2003, after all) and into a production of Cyrano de Bergerac. It's a concept that is just as believable as it is ridiculous and it makes for a terrifically smart, funny book. Ives's literary background is evident not only in her familiarity with the workshop culture she so gleefully satirizes, but in the fine-grained quality of her prose. And I can't remember the last time I encountered such a unique panoply of narrators! I'll admit, I have a soft spot for the delightfully insufferable Anton Beans, the self-appointed "heir apparent to the poem-based sector of the American humanities multiverse." Loudermilk is a weird, canny masterpiece and an absolute pleasure to read! Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A tale of two idiots--the handsome, charismatic Troy Augustus Loudermilk and his unassuming, socially anxious friend Harry Rego--who, in the early days of the new millennium, scam their way into a fellowship at the most prestigious creative writing program in the country
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 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.
Synopsis
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Hilarious . . . A riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend." --The Washington Post
It's the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. 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.
Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.
Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.