Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood assessment – lengthy Covid from the within | Books

It sounds just like the setup to a joke: a viral writer and a world virus stroll right into a novel. The punchline is lengthy Covid, an sickness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that merciless dissolution. “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she defined in a latest interview. The insanity is the tactic. But should the thoughts earlier than you may know the insanity?

Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, classic quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the form of author who conjures up parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred textual content of Lockwood lore is Priestdaddy, her wonderful 2017 memoir, which launched readers to the American writer’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s school fund on a classic guitar.

The pandemic handed Lockwood a brand new absurdity. She contracted Covid early, in March of 2020, when transmission was blamed on grotty fingers and each doorknob was suspect – the period of fruit bleaching and handwashing jingles. She was among the many first writers to provide form to the cognitive estrangement of the virus, its febrile illogic. “Hours, days of my memory had fallen out of my mind like chunks of plaster,” she wrote that July, as if the worst was behind her.

Will There Ever Be Another You is the story of what occurred subsequent, inflicted on a fictional Patricia: aphasia, hallucination, migraines, amnesia, paranoia, relentless self-obliteration. Can a novel carry that skull-fire with out being consumed by it? That is the wager of this ebook.

“What are you working on?” folks saved asking me. Little tales, I might evade, and go away it at that, as a result of if to put in writing about being unwell was self-indulgent, what adopted was that probably the most self-indulgent factor of all was to be unwell. But I used to be decided to do it. I used to be going to put in writing a masterpiece about being confused.

The result’s cortical shrapnel – you may nearly hear this ebook rattle while you open it. Lockwood’s title carries no query mark: it’s prayer, punchline, eulogy, manifesto, nightmare, usually abruptly. Fragmentation shouldn’t be a brand new mode for Lockwood (she was christened, in spite of everything, “the poet laureate of Twitter”). But it’s one factor to disrupt, one other to be disrupted. There is a brand new form of anguish right here, a eager for coherence.

The opening pages are the place she comes closest. Hollowed by the loss of a kid, an American household travels by way of Scotland, saved afloat by “pure itinerary”. A treasured merchandise is misplaced. Shortly afterwards, our heroine slips into fever. The treasure is returned; her thoughts shouldn’t be. It looks like a darkish enchantment, a faerie cut price. “It stole people from themselves.” Lockwood writes of her sickness. “You might look the same to others, but you had been replaced.”

Delirium reigns. We wheel from Roland Barthes to Cabbage Patch Kids, by way of Anna Karenina and the “butthole cut of Cats” (traditional Lockwood territory). But there’s a drum of obsession beating beneath the chaos. Doppelgangers, changelings, clones, dolls; images and synonyms – these pages teem with replicants and replication. The modus operandi of a virus.

It’s time to evoke the ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag: the patron saints of sicklit. Critics invoke Woolf to point out how troublesome it’s to pin sickness to the web page (“English … has no words for the shiver and the headache”); Sontag to mark the grief of displacement (“the kingdom of the sick”). Woolf makes sickness mystical; Sontag makes it bizarre. It has all the time been each. It’s time the dialog deepened. Our tales definitely have.

100 years have handed since Woolf complained that literature ignored the physique; now, it’s a website of untamed and sumptuous invention. Katherine Brabon’s novel Body Friend (2023) provides continual ache human kind, like an intimate model of Fight Club; Sanya Rushdi’s account of psychosis is so lucid it unsettles the very notion of insanity (Hospital, 2023; translated by Arunava Sinha); Kris Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace (2017) is an orgy of transformations and transgressions: erotic, technological, and ecological. These are simply three books inside arm’s attain (all occur to be by good Aussies).

Across all kinds and genres, writers are breaking taboos – of decorum, disgrace and syntax – to exalt in our corruptible flesh. There’s Ottessa Moshfegh’s metaphysical collapse (My Year of Rest and Relaxation), and Hanya Yanagihara’s baroque trauma (A Little Life). Kazuo Ishiguro’s robots and clones; Jeff Vandermeer’s spores and mutations; the ravenous and rotting world of physique horror. The physique is now not an absence, it’s a stage.

Lockwood’s detonated kind is evocative, however not particularly revolutionary (Eimear McBride was doing a model of it greater than a decade in the past in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing). We want accounts of lengthy Covid, and many extra of them. But Will There Ever Be Another You feels auteurish, the literary equal of a Wes Anderson movie: over-styled and perilously near self-parody. A delirious in-joke.

Online and on the web page, Lockwood’s brilliance has all the time been her capability to strip a joke again to its mechanics, and – by some means – make it sharper within the disassembly (see her viral poem Rape Joke). But that energy has begun to show in on itself. Her first novel, No One Is Talking About This (a prequel of types), assumed a fluency within the language of the web, referred to as “the portal”; Will There Ever Be Another You assumes a fluency in Lockwood.

Fandom is the worth of entry right here: not only a familiarity with the cult writer’s work, however along with her life: her estrangements and griefs, her delights and obsessions, even the precarious state of her husband’s bowels. Maggie Nelson’s most up-to-date ebook, Pathemata, learn the identical manner: privileging intimacy over literacy. Nelson was additionally writing about continual ache, and maybe that’s no coincidence. Pain traps you deep inside your individual brainbox; Will There Ever Be Another You recreates that entice. But the way you learn it – how you might be ready to learn it – relies on your relationship to Lockwood. And this ebook assumes you have already got one.