Patricia Lockwood’s latest is serious and funny
Late in her 2017 memoir, “Priestdaddy,” Patricia Lockwood writes about growing up in a world of “male systems and male anger,” a world that began at home with the actions of her father, a bombastic, charismatic, and often underwear-clad character who towers over much of the book. While some part of herself “did not make it out” of that “place of diminishment,” Lockwood found freedom in her art: “On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself.” Which makes it all the more calamitous when a lengthy bout of COVID at the start of the pandemic robs her of the facility with words that engenders her strength, her sense of self. Lockwood’s new novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” sees her trying to pull herself back together after “everything had been put back in the wrong place.” Or as her authorial avatar, whom I will call Patricia, puts it: “I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.”
Lockwood’s prior novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” also derives from her personal life, but this time the separation between fact and fiction is textual: “Some mornings she seemed true, and then she was I; some mornings she seemed false, and then she was she.” This duality between pre-COVID poet and long-COVID simulacrum can be felt in the new novel’s style, which begins with a mostly anonymous third-person narrative before giving way to the first-person narrative familiar from “Priestdaddy,” and in the novel’s title, taken from a Time magazine story about Dolly, the cloned sheep born in 1996. Yet another Patricia, arising during the development of an ultimately abandoned TV version of Lockwood’s memoir, also stalks these pages.
Patricia’s convalescence is complicated by several factors. She is still shadowed by the death of her niece, which is detailed in the second half of “No One Is Talking About This.” She confronts the deep societal divisions stoked by the pandemic, which left so many in thrall to conspiracy, including her father, who illegally holds Mass during lockdown and believes the COVID vaccine “put barcodes in people.” And she faces the “pure terror” of her husband Jason’s brush with death after severe complications from a routine procedure necessitates emergency surgery that leaves him with “the Wound,” a vertical incision held together by 36 staples.
These are heavy, often ponderously existential, story lines, but Lockwood’s characteristic whimsy lightens them. Patricia’s long-COVID complications include “alien hand syndrome,” “Who Foot Is That,” putting deodorant on her face, and going to the ER at one point because “she couldn’t feel herself going to the bathroom.” She details the tedious and often excruciating reality of promoting a novel, winning awards, and attending conferences during the lingering pandemic, all while feeling far from her usual self. I haven’t laughed harder at anything in Lockwood’s three books than I did when Jason comments on an interview where Patricia claimed to have synesthesia, a condition where a person associates a sensation, often a color, with things they see or hear: ‘“You said you saw ice cubes every time you read the word ‘refrigerator,’ and every time you heard a fife, you thought of the Revolutionary War. I don’t think that’s synesthesia,’ he says after a moment. ‘I think that’s just knowing what words mean.’”
But for much of this novel, something as fundamental as the meaning of words is elusive for Patricia. She goes to neurologists, alters her diet, and embarks “on a hallucinogenic program to heal [her] mind” that results in her “reading ‘Anna Karenina’ so hard I almost died” while sipping on psilocybin mushroom tea. Even without the hallucinogenics, this new novel often feels like spirit writing, with Lockwood taking poetic flights of fancy that are surreal and illogical. “I raised the hand with the pencil, it was a spoon, I took a bite. The cat turned and swept through the heavy red curtains that hung inside me.”
An arm’s-length detachment throughout much of the novel creates moments that will prove irresistible for forensic readers, including nods to Radiohead’s “Kid A” and a conversation — “the only adult conversation [she] had ever had in [her] life” — with, I believe, Sir Simon Rattle, who is married to “a premier Carmen.” Patricia’s frustration with her slow recovery leads her to consider abandoning writing for a time, à la Joy Williams, one of several contemporary writers who pop up semi-anonymously via still more breadcrumbs. And she muses on alternate careers, inspired by a metalworking class that introduces an apt metaphor about healing when her teacher charges Patricia with crafting a seamless ring, a perfect whole.
Recapturing the trick that makes her tick is a convoluted journey for Patricia, and occasionally the reader, one that ultimately reaches its destination thanks to a shamanic cryptid called MANGRO. And honestly, whatever works. Feeling disconnected from who you’ve become isn’t easy: “You could not lavish on it the love and solicitation you had previously lavished on the self, even though it was the thing that the self had been replaced by.” Whether that “it” stems from a virus or a tragic loss or even a near-miss, Lockwood shows that giving in by lavishing love or solicitation on despair, depression, or disease is never the right option, because there never will be another you.
WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU
By Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead, 256 pages, $29
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.
