To gloss just a few entries: a graduate student at a university lies in torpor under the desk of her professor with whom she’s been having an affair a child named Hamlet plots the demise of her parents an unfaithful husband jokes with his wife and daughter about Harvey Weinstein. Narratives of intractable family conflict abound, especially ones that involve adultery. Its books-within-books conceit is twisty and treacherous, and taken together its many stories read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal. There’s a convenient marriage in “Life Is Everywhere” between content and form, but that’s where the happiness ends. At the same time, it illuminates the ways in which such novels operate like families unto themselves, absorbing so much apparent dysfunction while maintaining the illusion that all of their parts constitute a happy-or at least a believable-whole. “Life Is Everywhere” holds out the hope that the novel might be a home to which everything belongs. Like Melville with his whaling vessel or Perec with his Parisian apartment complex, Ives, in her novel, attempts the impossible task of building a set in which every emotional and physical detail is noted and accounted for. Two names in particular, Herman Melville and Georges Perec, shed light on her own ambitions. In the afterword to her dizzying new novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” Lucy Ives cites a long and heterogeneous list of artistic influences.

The many stories in “Life Is Everywhere” read like an encyclopedia whose every entry is at its heart a story of intimate betrayal. LUCY IVES'S TWISTING AND TREACHEROUS UPDATE ON THE ADULTERY PLOT

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