In her new novel, Patricia Lockwood wonders if she’s lost her mind?

AUTOFICTION
Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury Publishing, $32.99

In a world where literature is increasingly manufactured and increasingly irrelevant, where more novels seem to be written both by and for creative writing students, the offbeat writing of Patricia Lockwood stands out like a weed in concrete. A Midwestern poet who undertook her literary education on social media, Lockwood has made a career out of the absurd and personal.

While most writers flounder and fail to resonate with a public readership, she has achieved fame and acclaim three times over: first with Rape Joke, a viral poem about her own assault; then Priestdaddy, an absurdist memoir of childhood in a Catholic rectory and No One Is Talking About This, an autobiographical novel that blends online irony with personal grief. Now, in Will There Ever Be Another You, she offers a thinly fictionalised version of herself wondering if she’s lost her mind.

The novel begins shortly before the pandemic with the narrator on a family holiday in Scotland. In this mostly comedic travelogue, her mother repeatedly tries and fails to order iced tea, her husband scores the family on how much they sound like locals, and the Lockwood stand-in is preoccupied with the death of her niece, whose brief life formed the crux of her last novel. Soon, the landscape provides what amounts to the book’s thematic conceit: a trip to the Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye leaves the narrator feeling that “she was not quite herself”, inspiring thoughts of changelings and mystical mischief.

By the next chapter, the narrator has COVID, America is in lockdown, and nothing feels anything like it should. The writing jumps around with her addled mind as she tries to process her domestic environment. In one moment, she ponders the question of how original a Cabbage Patch Kid is after every part has been replaced. In another, she makes up a Beatles song about Anna Karenina.

Her madness is at its most American when she swaps conspiracy theories with her friends, her own pet one being that “none of the popes had ever been the real pope”. The prose bounces between paragraphs and fragments, while the protagonist runs the full gamut of singular pronouns. Lockwood’s writing offers few handrails to the reader, but the untrammelled, madcap flow offers a compelling depiction of a creative mind lost in a virus.

The velocity and madness of the book both diminish in its second half, as the author recovers from her illness and returns to her normal existence. Sadly for the reader, the self Lockwood finds again is not that of a misfit being impossibly funny, but of a writer who has made it, whose life is filled with more names to drop and less friction. Pamela Anderson and Kurt Russell are just two of the celebrity collaborators mentioned, while an entire chapter is built around the narrator speaking at the same venue as the Canadian writer Anne Carson. The most emotional section of the book – chronicling her husband’s surgery and recovery– gets disappointingly short shrift, while the reader is presented with a series of David Sedaris-style vignettes about family life, travel, and hobbies.

Fortunately, Lockwood is at least as funny as David Sedaris, and far more distinctive. Throughout Will There Ever Be Another You, she displays only a playful fluency with the poetic qualities and absurdities of language, providing vivid bursts of introspection: “Memories that are allowed to run on inside you maintain a kind of vascular velvet.”

There is a particular manic glee she exhibits in tacking endings on to otherwise innocuous sentences: “Then there was the funniest thing that had ever happened to them in bed, an episode of female priapism.” In this author’s hands, even a comma can be squeezed for maximum comic effect.

By the end of the novel, it’s 2025 and neither Lockwood nor her country have returned to anything that could genuinely be called normal. Still, if both the author and her nation look to be going through a kind of decline, at least she gives us plenty to laugh about on the way.

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