“Tell me,” Kurt Vonnegut asks Jane Marie Cox, his future wife, “would you enjoy living with me, sleeping with me, leading a carnival life?”

And then there is the appendix. You have turned the last page of Lucy Ives’s intricate, darkly funny debut, and a curious timeline appears. Have you missed a plot point or two or 10?

A photograph on the pamphlet extolling the benefits of emigration features women in red swimsuits, skidding on water skis across Sydney Harbor — a jarring contrast to the bleak circumstances of a British couple named Charlotte and Henry in their mold-afflicted, too-small house in Cambridge.