Impossible Views of the World

June 12, 2017
Ives’s smart and singular debut novel chronicles what turns out to be a big week in the life of Stella Kraus, a petite and observant map expert for a Manhattan museum resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the course of seven days, Stella works through the one-sided residual effects of an affair with an inscrutable colleague being groomed to run the museum. Stella also copes with her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s inappropriate appearances at her work and work functions, eventually taking the matter into her own hands, so to speak. And what about the disappearance of a male colleague? The illustrated map Stella discovers while snooping in his office quickly becomes an obsession as she attempts to determine its provenance by embarking on a sort of scavenger hunt. Ives maximizes her story’s humor with subtlety; a line here and there is enough to call attention to the absurdity of, for instance, the museum’s corporate benefactor’s attempt to secure the world’s water rights. She also isn’t afraid to make her heroine unlikable, which works in the novel’s favor. Ives’s prose and storytelling feel deliberately obtuse at times, requiring readers to slow down to fully immerse themselves in the narrative’s nuances, but the result is an odd and thoroughly satisfying novel.

Starred review from June 1, 2017
An art historical mystery that will interest fans of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, with a narrator equal parts intellectual, ironic, and cool.In Ives' scintillating debut novel, an up-and-coming young New York museum curator named Stella Krakus must solve the mystery of a co-worker's disappearance, fend off her soon-to-be ex-husband, and retrieve her heart from an ill-conceived office dalliance. Stella, who is a 19th-century cartographic specialist, finds a photocopy of a meticulously detailed and illustrated old map titled "Elysia" folded up in her missing colleague's pencil drawer. Her largely scholarly detective work on the matter also entails a bit of breaking and entering and lunch with her glamorous, secretive art-dealer mother. Ives' writing derives much of its humor from a combination of high and low--arch formulations and mini-disquisitions studded with cussing, sex, and jokes about Reddit. Its delights include a description of Stella's Williamsburg neighbors--"proofreaders dressed as majorettes, anorexics in suspenders, rich women in artisanal clogs propping up sobbing toddlers"--and this account of love: "the feeling...of it being spring for the first time, the face of a tiny kitten who is speaking fluent Spanish and is also a genie who can grant your wish, of being truly implied as the person I really was when another person spoke my name. My heart was a piece of paper. It was a paper fan. It was a dove." Also delectable are an excoriating direct address to the cheaters of the world and a definition of charm in art that seems to have much wider applicability--it's "what happens when nothing works in a given painting. But what you get when nothing works is everything." Yes! A diversion and a pleasure, this novel leaves you feeling smarter and hipper than you were before.

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July 1, 2017
Paul Coral, head cataloger for the Central Museum of Art, in New York City, is dead. Stella Krakus, a young assistant curator, finds a map in his office that she is sure was left for her. The map shows the fictional land of Elysia, a place where no one mourns, / And nothing irreplaceable is lost, / And nothing lost is irretrievable, which leads her into the archives to discover a Wonderland-esque book from the 1840s. As she travels further down the rabbit hole of secret societies and bequests, her personal life continues its shambling trajectoryher ex-husband won't stay away, and it turns out having an affair with her boss was a pretty bad idea. Stella is like Hannah Horvath from Girlssmart, with an equal tendency toward snark and introspectionliving in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The novel sends up the museum world, with pretentious art folks courting corporate dollars and the usual office politics, but maintains a sense of something larger, even magical, working in the background. Brainy, hipster fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)