It’s what you always want to hear: the most exciting writer-critic writing right now has set herself an impossible task. She is going to write a novel about losing her mind to the coronavirus and evoke it in language, what it feels and sounds like to live in a world where “solid objects seem to rain”.
Patricia Lockwood, at 43, is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and she has written there – authoritatively, brilliantly, personally and at length – on writers and subjects as diverse as Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, mysticism and the Pope. She delivered perhaps the best thing I’ve read on David Foster Wallace as we enter the middle period of his re-examination. As critic, she’s merciless, loving, sparkling and never falls for the conventional consensus while remaining utterly attuned to what it is.
As a writer, she’s published two books of poetry since her breakout poem – the devastating, hilarious and zeitgeist-defining “Rape Joke” – in 2013. There are three book-length works of prose, the first a memoir, and a breakout hit, Priestdaddy, in 2017. Then, in 2021, her brilliant “novel” No One Is Talking About This took her incredible facility with Twitter and made it, and the internet more generally, both its form and subject.
No One Is Talking About This is amazing and recognised as so: shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Women’s Prize and winning the Dylan Thomas Prize. Two-thirds of that wonderful book (which will probably live in the culture like Coupland’s Generation X or Microserfs) is given over to a Lockwood-proxy posting such phenomenal content on “the Portal” (aka Twitter) that she rises to internet fame. She’s invited to universities to speak (on social media? the net generally? What do I know? the narrator asks – her most famous tweet is “Can a dog be twins?”). But there’s a doubt in her, a hole, and the last third of the narrative is given over to the narrator finding access to a deeper meaning in grief when her niece is born with a rare condition – six months to live.
In grief literature there is this thing called the “death of the assumptive world”. A profound event destabilises, even destroys, a moral, intellectual, emotional and physical world for a grieving person. Meaning has to be rebuilt, sought and perhaps found elsewhere. This is the book’s trajectory and it’s incredibly funny, sparkling, sometimes callow and often jejune, but fundamentally it’s good, and that’s a true trajectory. So, it was weird to find the author still posting amazing and often facile stuff on Twitter, aka X, after putting the book down.
But the pandemic happened, right? The biggest assumptive world death ever. This big book came out in 2021, and as we learnt through her long Diary pieces in the LRB, Lockwood contracted an early strain of the virus on holiday in Scotland in 2020. It encountered fertile ground in Lockwood’s restless brain, and went to work. Patricia Lockwood lost her mind to Covid and its aftereffects and it was so profound she set herself the impossible task of capturing this: “‘What are you working on?’ people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.”
The result might lose her some friends.
Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece of comic genius, Tristram Shandy, was published in serial form in nine volumes from 1859 to 1767. Something (postmodernism?) happens in the later parts of the book that’s sort of akin to what’s happening in Will There Ever Be Another You Sterne starts talking, in Tristram Shandy, about the public reception, both positive and negative, to Tristram Shandy.
Lockwood’s latest work has the same self-referentiality, to her life, her work, her fame. The world of Will There Ever Be Another You consists of Lockwood’s, with which fans are now very familiar and many adore – her mad and wonderful priest father (“he’s thinking of schisming!”), Jason “her Husband”, the sister, the mourned niece. They all persist in the new book, their familiarity assumed, and even our affection, too. Lockwood – refracted through “she”, “her” sometimes “I” – is losing her mind, but the content of the book becomes that of her becoming famous. What does success look like when you’re losing your mind? Our narrator is interviewed ad nauseam.
Whole sections consist of her thoughts as she is photographed, gets her hair cut, and collaborates on a doomed TV adaptation of Priestdaddy for Amazon Prime. In her downtime from fame, there are the now-familiar habits of her marriage and her family – they recite bits of Wikipedia to each other. They watch endless Korean dramas together and seek out abstruse IMDB connections and say cute things while the world collapses. There are chapters on hobbies. Might some fans (with jobs), despite sympathy with her state of mind and the effects of the virus, start to lose a certain sense of identification, so critical to the earlier books, with this precocious, amazing genius getting all she deserves?
But then there are the singing zingers, the amazingly funny bathos, the astonishing similes. “His height seeming to climb the trunk of an immense satisfaction.” To the rescue of content come style, facility, brilliance, and, uh, poetry. Language has not died of Covid, but language has taken a strange and difficult turn.
“Then there was her Galapagos feeling, a green teetering inside her, splintering of finches, the breathless incipience of a new species.”
“There’s a Galapagos, Ohio?” she heard her husband asking her mother on the phone.
“OH YEAH!” her mother screamed in her OH YEAH voice.
It’s all always like this: fragments; bathos (the close pairing of the sublime and the ridiculous); genius, but also an assumed familiarity – an assumed affection almost – with everything about Patricia. All there at the same time: a rich, sometimes near-impenetrable verbalised evocation of a kind of madness that has a crazed delight in the strangeness – the new strange mess – of words in the face of a novel virus and its novel effects. And that lovely, familiar warmth. But is this a novel? Well, first, no one defines novel but the novelist, and second, this is poetry. Is this poetry?
Maybe it is a masterpiece, and maybe it’s an extended, involuted, fragmentary and navel-gazing disaster that was perhaps necessary but won’t do her public profile any favours. Goodreads has so far rendered it into the no-consensus banana republic of 3.5 stars. Most reviews so far are dominated by sparkling, wonderful interviews. Martin Amis said, “Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the language dies.” In some weird way, Lockwood has died, but her language has not – it’s gone to another plane. Dip into it, like poetry. Page by page it sounds like no one else, and will make you see the world differently. At the very least, Patricia Lockwood lost her mind and did it justice.
