Whether Orion ought to be feet- or head-up in the night sky depends on the hemisphere. When Stan, a 23-year-old student from South Australia, rides his bike through the Rocky Mountains, he marvels that the constellation is upside down.

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?

“Let’s Not Do That Again” is a political comedy of manners that reads like the love child of Page Six and a long episode of “Veep.”