Book Review: ‘Will There Ever Be Another You,’ by Patricia Lockwood - The New York Times
Length: • 5 mins
Annotated by David Kanigan
Fiction
In “Will There Ever Be Another You,” Patricia Lockwood recounts the pandemic’s devastating effects on her life.
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WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU, by Patricia Lockwood
The admonition to write drunk and edit sober is often attributed, incorrectly, to Ernest Hemingway. About her new autobiographical novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” Patricia Lockwood recently told The New Yorker, “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane.”
The insanity has not been edited out. This contributes to the novel’s surrealism and its gently awkward fuzziness — at times it can resemble what mental health professionals like to call a “word salad” — and also to its not inconsiderable weight and charm. “Will There Ever Be Another You” is a pandemic novel, and it conveys the bewilderment its author felt while racked with long Covid.
Will There Ever Be Another You
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Lockwood had, among other symptoms, a relentless, indissoluble migraine. The reader is reminded of Joan Didion’s comment: “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep in an attack, an ambiguous blessing.”
“Will There Ever Be Another You” feels like a holding pattern, a string of days between stations, a notebook dump and a fever dream. It is the sound of a writer semi-successfully calling on reserve powers, trying to push through a heavy, befuddling time. I suspect it will divide her many readers. It divided me.
It lacks the sustained barrage of audacities and rascalities that defined her last novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021), which remains one of the best things yet written about online life. In that novel Lockwood managed to come across as a master of the American folk art of kidding (as Dwight Macdonald said of Delmore Schwartz) yet was deadly serious at the same time.
The aphorisms in her new novel are not as keen, and the leaves are not raked into piles. Yet this elliptical book, often best read as poetry, can be involving and moving, and it has sharp spikes of observation. The grief is stirred in slowly. It’s a sickroom meditation; the author becomes a stranger in a strange land.
The narrator begins to feel ill on a trip to Scotland with her husband in the fall of 2020. She is weak; she can no longer remember names and faces; she sees colors that are not there. Worse, she can’t write. (“Her head was like a vodkamelon rolling backward off her neck.”) The disease makes her 10 percent more psychic, she writes. She becomes interested in crystals.
She tries to rewire her brain by ingesting mushrooms “but succeeded mainly in becoming temporarily psychotic and reading ‘Anna Karenina’ so hard I almost died.” She feels a connection with a character in a different Tolstoy novel: “Ivan Ilyich would have googled his symptoms perpetually.”
Her woes worsen when her husband nearly dies from an intestinal blockage that requires multiple surgeries and 36 gory staples in his abdomen. Where once they were Nick and Nora or Hepburn and Tracy, “they had become Disaster People. At some point they had stopped living life, and started living Life-and-Death.”
Lockwood is well-read on the subject of illness, and she draws on that reading with an almost metaphysical acuteness, never pressing too heavily. This novel is a work of criticism in which life is the subject. She mediates between reality and art; she reminds you that every text has a context.
Among this book’s primary subtopics is fame — Lockwood’s own. There is a good deal here about photo shoots and interviews and public speaking and residencies in far-flung locales. Pamela Anderson asks the narrator to ghostwrite her autobiography. There’s an account of work on a television series about her life, drawing from her 2017 memoir “Priestdaddy.” Kurt Russell is approached to play her father.
Lockwood appears to be comically ambivalent about the tinsel that attends life as a beloved, in-demand, much-traveled writer. Yet the problem with a sustained autobiographical project is that you begin reaching for things to talk about. The plush obstacles that face a famous writer can hold one’s interest only for so long.
Is this part of what Sheila Heti was talking about when she wrote, “Once a writer starts to have an interesting life their writing always suffers”?
“Will There Ever Be Another You” returns us to a time (circa the attack on the U.S. Capitol) and to a cultural moment that, in her addled states, gave Lockwood a case of the dreads:
For three weeks straight I have nightmares about being asked about cancel culture. It is my greatest fear, to be asked about cancel culture — or that I will be so terrorized by the possibility that I will immediately begin talking about it anyway, and in doing so present the opportunity to be murdered by public opinion myself. Because all my subtle calibrations have been lost. I no longer know what is OK to say. “I am going to be the Aaron Neville of literature” — was that all right?
Her writing about her public persona can also, in this novel, drift into a procession of dream-logic sentences. Her brain is no longer a sequential processor; the cheese is sliding off the cracker. Much of the novel reads this way:
As usual I was there as a kind of traveling exhibit. I showed up to the student gathering and immediately screamed, like a seagull, they’re lying to you! Which they were, whoever they were. They were calling it a demitasse but there wasn’t even coffee, let alone the little cups. They were selling glamour to children, but look where I had been put: a hotel with a clam-themed bathroom, though possibly all bathrooms were clam-themed for me now. I ran a palm down the side of my face. One of the students was wearing the hugest pants possible, big enough to conceal anything. I said, You must go out to the jungle, the deep wood, the night cove. All that sounded very impressive. “The clam zone.”
As she charts the untamed fluctuations of her thought and sensibility, the paragraphs can seem glazed, like candy that’s gone sugary in the heat.
Lockwood being Lockwood, this novel also contains disquisitions on topics as various as Gene Kelly’s career, pâté de Lyon (“lion paste”), the commemorative editions of Time magazine that one sees in checkout lines, shaving her head and resembling Tweety Bird, the potency of certain names (“A man named Lemuel sounded like he would be hung apocalyptically”) and conspiracy theories about the best Cuomo, the musician Rivers. She dispenses little chips of pleasure.
I have poked and prodded at this book because it’s the sort that invites a reader to do so. It’s a mixed success. But as a member of the rabble that likes to read novels, especially ones by writers so adept, I can’t help remaining committed to following Lockwood where she leads.
WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU | By Patricia Lockwood | Riverhead | 248 pp. | $29