The fun starts with the title. Will There Ever Be Another You is a quotation from the cover of Time magazine, March 10, 1997, a framed copy of which Patricia Lockwood’s protagonist, a writer also named Patricia Lockwood, is shown by a vendor in an antique mall during the pandemic: “Will There Ever Be Another You? A Special Report on Cloning.” The Time cover image is a duplicated photo of Dolly, the Finn Dorset ewe born in Scotland eight months earlier, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. Repeating the question, Lockwood removes the question mark, thereby suggesting that her book contains the answer. Her own subtitle, had she provided one, might have been “A Special Report on Covid,” because although the virus, which she caught in March 2020, is barely named in the book, its effect on her facility with language—making it more grandiloquent than ever—is Lockwood’s subject.
After the title comes the disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.” Next is the epigraph, to be read slowly and in full. It is taken from the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Ibn Sina’s thought experiment “Floating Man” or “Flying Man,” which suggests that consciousness, “created falling through air or a void,” has an existence independent from the body.
A cloned sheep, a coincidental resemblance to herself, a mind in free fall: now that Lockwood has removed our bearings, her tale of disorientation can begin. The novel, if it is a novel—it might be filed under memoir, but Lockwood variously calls it a “mirrorball,” “a hyperobject,” and “a Louis Wain cat”—is a study in attention deficit disorder, in which we are blasted back and forth through time and space and airdropped into various rooms in various countries where the protagonist talks to herself, her mother, her doctor, her husband, Jason, and niece, Angel; to Shakespeare’s wife, to a host of largely unnamed authors, interviewers, and journalists; to a friend with whom she is cowriting a television script, and to the participants at a biography conference in Lisbon where she has come “because allegedly I had written a biography—of who or what, I had no idea.”
In Part One, Lockwood refers to her fictional double in the third person, in Part Two she uses the first person, and in Part Three she returns to the third person, and then alternates between second and first. The shift reflects her experience of the virus and its lingering aftermath, and her concern with distinguishing truth from falsehood: “Some mornings she seemed true, and then she was I; some mornings she seemed false, and then she was she.”
The first scene takes place in Scotland, natal home of Dolly: “As soon as she touched down in Scotland,” reads the opening line of chapter one, “she believed in fairies.” Having fallen “a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud,” the narrator lands with her mother, sister, and Jason at the Fairy Pools (rock ponds fed by waterfalls) on the Isle of Skye. Her sister is mourning her daughter. Readers of Lockwood’s debut novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021), about being online, know the story of this baby, whose brief life and death from a rare neurological disorder are described in the book’s second half.* The first half is about falling into the TARDIS of Twitter, where Lockwood developed her voice and garnered a devoted following. She appeared twice on The Atlantic’s list of “The Best Tweets of All Time,” and her narrator in No One Is Talking About This becomes famous when her absurdist tweet, “Can a Dog be Twins?,” blows up. Can a sheep be twins? The sheep in Scotland, Lockwood now notes in Will There Ever Be Another You (or ewe), were “spray-painted according to who owned them.”
Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy (2017)—a generic comedy about an eccentric family, which followed her two volumes of poetry, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012) and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014)—introduced us to Jason, whom she met online in a poetry chatroom, and to her parents in Kansas City. Her mother likes puns and her father, Greg, is a conservative Catholic priest who boasts that his conversion experience, which occurred on a nuclear submarine after watching The Exorcist seventy-two times, was “the deepest…on record.” Because he had a wife and children, special dispensation was required for Greg to join the priesthood.
There was a smugness to Priestdaddy that came from Lockwood’s having an established fan base: the zaniness felt like a stand-up routine, and the book took few risks. In No One Is Talking About This she puts her material on acid to recreate the feeling of being online, “that feeling that everything is just covered in lube, and you’re just sliding down this luge hole,” as she put it in an interview with Slate. Will There Ever Be Another You is what she calls an attempt to write “a masterpiece about being confused,” something “no one has ever tried before.” Having removed the narrative moorings and increased the aerodynamic drag, she makes sure that we can hear our ears popping.
Lockwood goes viral in her first novel and gets the virus in her second: the books are fraternal twins. Having Covid and being Extremely Online amount to much the same experience, it turns out: in each case she is “optimized” and caught in a stream of consciousness not her own. “She opened the portal and the mind met her more than halfway,” Lockwood writes in the opening line of No One Is Talking About This. The portal is her name for the Internet, to which she is addicted, and the book ends with her phone, containing pictures of her niece, being stolen from her pocket. The absence of her phone lifts the narrator “off her feet, lighter. Her whole self was on it, if anyone wanted.”
In the first chapter of Will There Ever Be Another You, Lockwood’s sister loses her own phone, which contains a visual record of her daughter’s whole short life. According to Scottish folklore, a human child stolen by the fairies can be replaced by a changeling:
“We shouldn’t have drunk the water,” they would say later. It had angered the fairies—no, not angered. They simply demanded something in exchange. But as soon as they saw what was on the phone, the face, the flicking motion, they knew it was too much. They would give it back and keep only the scarf, which was just from Target.
It is after drinking from the Fairy Pools that the narrator becomes feverish, falling “so far out of the world, out of the human population, that she could not even rejoin them to watch the butthole cut of Cats.” She too is a changeling: the virus “stole people from themselves. You might look the same to others, but you had been replaced.” Her fever is compared to “a long, lung-bursting dive that seemed to separate the old self from the new with the light net of glitter on her skin that meant she was soon to catch something, some meaning.” She remembers the craze for Cabbage Patch Kids, fabric dolls that came with a name and a birth certificate; should your Cabbage Patch Kid get damaged, you could send it away for rebirth. Her grandmother, rich enough to have bought a real one, had a knockoff made for Patricia “that would never fool anyone.” She has become the knockoff dolly version of herself.
Her sense of time dissolves. On the first day of the sickness, she visits the standing stones at the Clava Cairns, which are said to carry you back in time, but “she felt herself back in time anyway, casting a shadow to say three o’clock.” In the second chapter, when she and Jason have returned to America, she has a fever for forty-eight days, and long Covid sets in. “I live completely in the present now,” she writes in an apology for missing an email, but she also lives in the future. “So I did predict it then,” she says when she dreams, five years after his funeral, that David Bowie has died.
Twelve months after returning from Scotland, the narrator finds herself “obsessively revising” 150 words she had written about the sickness at the Fairy Pools, but she still cannot “catch” some meaning, or make it “mean anything” at all. She records her thoughts in a secret “mad notebook,” because “no one wants to read about any of this.” The surrealism of her symptoms includes “alien hand syndrome” and seeing “colors over things that weren’t there.” She “overidentifies” with “people, with landscapes, with tender bends in plants, as if I were a kudzu overtaking the earth.” Her father, a conspiracy theorist inhabiting his own alternative reality, thinks that the Covid vaccine puts barcodes in our bodies, but she would like a barcode “to keep track of herself.” She sits at “the foot of the illness,” asking it questions. She becomes aphasic, writing “hee vaguna” for “her vagina” and pronouncing Van Gogh “Van Gah,” and then, after taking mushrooms to rewire her brain, 10 percent more psychic: “The blessed state would only last about forty-eight hours, but for that duration, time once more went in sequence, words marched in their sentences, and people on the beach walked in and out of the songs.”
At times she enjoys her symptoms, which is the “cardinal sin”:
You could not become interested in the illness. 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. You could not, though the brain told you to do it, laugh out loud: that it looked so much like a creature, in a painting of deep time.
But everyone is interested in the illness because everyone has it at the same time and everyone is living online. “I know it sounds crazy,” one man posts, “but sometimes I think this is a fantastic experience.”
Lockwood is a writer’s writer, and Will There Ever Be Another You is a bookish book, a magnificent feat of reading. The chapter called “Mr. Tolstoy, You’re Driving Me Mad,” is devoted to the narrator’s mushroom-induced notes on Anna Karenina, which she reads “so hard I almost died”: “What if Karenin had breastfed the baby? Karenin should have breastfed the baby.” In the chapter called “Hashish in Marseilles,” she introduces her homeschooled niece, Angel, to Walter Benjamin. “What does this sentence mean to you?” Lockwood asks Angel, before quoting, “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back.” She considers Robert Graves, quotes Wordsworth, who visited the same spot in Scotland where she fell ill, jokes that William Carlos Williams had a son named Kevin, and reads Kafka’s journals. The Bible is her touchstone, lending her prose its prophetic cadences:
In the valley of dry bones she was rising and rising, trying to remember how the body had been. Open the Song of Songs, and faces were pink with rampant lambs; breasts were heaps of spices, feet turned to burnished brass; the simile was laid next to you under white sheets; and every single like came true, from the mouth of the anonymous poet.
Among her unacknowledged influences are Thomas De Quincey, whose drug-induced reveries in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater are echoed in Lockwood’s Covid dreams; Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill,” which is the novel’s urtext; and Coleridge, whose own monologuing was recorded by Keats in a letter describing a walk they both took on Hampstead Heath:
In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical Sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch—single and double touch—a dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so m[an]y metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—southey believes in them—southeys belief too much diluted—A Ghost story—Good morning—I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard it as he moved away—I had heard it all the interval—if it may be called so.
Lockwood’s force field of words similarly continues long after we have ceased to follow her thoughts, understand her connections, work out who she is talking to, or where in the world she has now landed.
Woolf suggests in “On Being Ill” that writers are prevented from writing about illness by “the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Lockwood responds accordingly: “Headache, I would write, though it was never located within—it was more that I joined some headache outside me.” The invalid, Woolf continues, is “forced to coin words himself,” which he does by “taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other,” crushing them together until “a brand new word in the end drops out.” Lockwood coins the word “ranchously”: “Incredible that someone had been able to write beautifully, philosophically, even ranchously about this experience,” she says of a word without meaning.
“Writers like being bodiless,” she explains in Priestdaddy, yet nothing interests her more than a body out of control—“as if,” she exclaims in Will There Ever Be Another You, “it is a thing you are writing!” Bodies in extremis are everywhere in her life and work: her niece died of Proteus syndrome, named after the shape-shifting prophetic sea-god because the gene causes cellular overgrowth, and in Priestdaddy, Lockwood and Jason move in with her parents when he develops advanced cataracts. Lockwood’s Twitter followers raise the necessary $10,000 for the operation to prevent him from losing his sight, but it’s unsuccessful, and he begins having visions like a mystic.
In Will There Ever Be Another You, Jason nearly dies from an agonizing intestinal disruption, collapsing in the lavatory while on a plane: transformation scenes in Lockwood’s world take place either underwater or midair. Writing about a similar crisis in the London Review of Books, Lockwood recollects that the doctors who treated him had, inevitably, seen nothing like it before. “It’s hard to invent something new that the body does,” she writes. “Don’t you know that you’re a metaphor?” she asks Jason’s ruptured bowel.
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) challenged the myth of the “cancer personality” and “TB character,” but for Lockwood there are not metaphors or similes enough to describe her Covid personality. In her delirium, “pathways are trying to break past the outer walls,” “solid objects seem to rain,” and “my reading comes and goes like a magic store.” For unexplained reasons she takes wormwood every morning, “like a witch from the Bible,” shaves her head, like in a scene from an “old book,” and paints her tongue purple. This is illness as performance art.
She is her father’s daughter: competitive, loudmouthed, a cult leader, Catholic to the core. Whether or not she believes in God’s plot, she inhabits a Catholic universe in which anything can happen. “Faith and my father taught me the same lesson,” Lockwood writes in Priestdaddy, “to live in the mystery, even to love it.” His conversion was the deepest on record, and Lockwood’s subject is also conversion: breaking a person into pieces and reassembling the parts, breaking a novel into pieces to describe that broken person. She gives us, however, not depth but the impersonation of depth; the pile-on of hyperinflated imagery suggests only the shallow avidity of her Covid experience. Her real interest is in height: language rises for Lockwood, every symptom spurring her on to greater levels of impassioned prose.
In a chapter called “Doppelgänger” she is standing at the same podium where Anne Carson had read, three weeks earlier, “a new work about someone called Anne Carson—Anne Patricia, actually.” Lockwood’s real doppelgänger, however, is the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, who also wrote about doubles. Spark believed in a sixth, “literary,” sense that allows certain readers and writers to see inside words as though they were looking at an X-ray, and Lockwood herself has this sense. When she reads, she recalls in Priestdaddy, her head goes “diagonal” and she sees in sentences “not what I was supposed to see…. The meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper.”
Spark’s own conversion to Catholicism coincided with a nervous breakdown during which T.S. Eliot’s words began jumping about on the page and rearranging themselves into threatening messages—“lived,” for example, became “devil.” This terrifying experience became the subject of her first novel, The Comforters (1957), another masterpiece about being confused. Because the anagrams would not translate into novel form, Spark instead had her heroine, Caroline Rose, hear an invisible typewriter record her every thought. “And then the typewriter again: tap-tap-tap…‘My God,’ she cried aloud, ‘Am I going mad?’” Caroline was not going mad: she was being turned into a character in a novel.
“Tap tap tap,” Lockwood now writes in Will There Ever Be Another You. She is working on her “mad notebook,” where the words are cavorting and taking off from the page while she tries not to look at her left wrist because, although no one else can tell, it is “refracted like a stem in a glass of water.” Nothing, however, that took place during her madness was “more frightening” than receiving by mail “a book” with “my name on it.” She is referring to a bound copy of No One Is Talking About This, which was published in February 2021. But Lockwood has been a book with her name on it for a long time now. “She turned a page in her mind,” she says in Will There Ever Be Another You. She was born with the Internet inside her, she suggests in No One Is Talking About This; the Internet, she wrote in Priestdaddy, where “we were all made up of words,” was “a book that continually wrote itself,” and she felt herself “going out of print.”
“The end was an oasis you never wanted to reach,” the narrator writes in her closing pages. Recovering her health, she is giving a talk to students and has invented a mythical creature that lives in water. “The best version” of an ending, she instructs, would be “when you were in it and all the components were in hurricane.” But the hurricane is now over, and Lockwood’s bold but unsteady novel about becoming a character in a bold but unsteady novel does not end so much as run out of breath.
English (US) · 