An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays

In these meandering essays, novelist Ives (Life Is Everywhere) struggles to locate thematic through lines in her myriad musings. Of the five lengthy pieces, “The Three-Body Problem” is the most successful. In it, Ives recounts the anxiety she felt being pregnant in the early months of the Covid pandemic, traces the history of obstetrics from ancient Rome through the present, and decries the “excessive medicalization of childbirth in the United States,” contending that doctors rely on chemical and surgical interventions out of the paternalizing belief that pregnant people can’t “vaginally manage the exit of the ‘person’ stuck inside them.” Other entries are less focused. “Earliness, or Romance” uses the 1954 movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a springboard to explore what Aristophanes, Freud, and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant have written about love before straying into tenuously related discussions of dreams about her son, genealogical research she’s conducted on her ancestors, and the “famous cruelty” of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. The title essay is particularly jumbled, touching on her embarrassment at composing a clunky college essay about a peer’s poem, recordings she made of fights with her first husband, and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s writings on memory, all without arriving at a cogent thesis. Long-winded and puzzling, these pieces struggle to find the point. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)