E-book Evaluation
Will There Ever Be One other You
By Patricia LockwoodRiverhead: 256 pages, $29
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Some years in the past, I used to be interviewing a Columbia neurologist for a possible article on imaging. After a tour of her laboratory and MRI scanner, dialogue concerning the frontal cortex and the mysteries of synapses, she supplied a easy declarative sentence: “We are our brains.” I recalled her pithy remark all through the COVID-19 pandemic, as scientific proof emerged that the virus had focused our brains, amongst different organs, leaving a organic marker on many (most?) of these contaminated by SARS-CoV-2 (the official identify for the virus, distinguishing it from the illness). The proof consists of heightened threat for stroke, breaching of the blood-brain barrier and “brain fog,” which may linger for months.
Patricia Lockwood, poet and writer of the prizewinning memoir “Priestdaddy,” evokes the pandemic’s lengthy tail in her expressionistic autofiction, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” recounting mind-altering results on her protagonist, “Patricia,” as she and her husband quarantine in Savannah, Ga., throughout the preliminary 2020 outbreak and subsequent surges. A author, Patricia printed a confessional work about her household that she is adapting right into a screenplay; as her prolonged sickness kicks in, she finds it tough to craft something of benefit. She writes snatches of description and dialogue in her journal, however when she reads them later, her phrases jumble like hieroglyphs. She’s distracted by intrusive ideas, sentence fragments, out-of-the-blue hallucinations, even her personal fraught relationships, putting the blame on SARS-CoV-2: “It has come all this way, she thought, cradling the thing in her chest; has passed through the hands of invention or chance, white lab coats, wet markets, the gates of the zoo … to land in her squarely, like love!” Like Sylvia Plath in her excellent poem, “Fever 103,” Patricia struggles with fluctuating temperatures and a sluggishness she connects to her artwork: “In a story, fever was something that moved you along, sped up time, or made it different, parted the curtain for some ray of revelation — perhaps that’s why the world had decided to have one, so it could have a dream in which all the people were there.”
“Will There Ever Be Another You” drapes a veil over a throughline — often it appears Lockwood has trashed the idea of narrative arc in a match of pique, as she leaps from setting to setting (Scotland, Cincinnati, coastal Georgia), with uneven outcomes. The motion is blurred, her characters faceless as mannequins. Patricia’s husband intervenes valiantly to assist her, lending colour and wit to her predicament, however we suspect he can’t save her. There are mounted factors, although: hospitals, spiritual anguish, scenes along with her quirky household, a fierce need to reclaim her writing life. They add as much as an erasure of self, its which means elusive: “This was a 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 the self was replaced by.”
From chapter to chapter, Lockwood deploys an associative technique: anecdotes, recollections and social commentary string collectively, wealthy and kinetic if complicated. Patricia is each invested in and disengaged from her personal psychological well being and her husband’s medical challenges. Motifs of motherhood shift out and in of view; are the tragedies precise or fever-fantasy? Some jokes hit their marks; others fall flat. Lockwood piles on literary and common tradition references. William Carlos Williams, “Anna Karenina,” Katherine Anne Porter, “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Cats,” Foghorn Leghorn: all get shoutouts right here, a collective misery name that fails to maneuver us. Patricia additionally bogs down within the particulars of translating her earlier guide right into a Hollywood screenplay, with Kurt Russell eager on the a part of her father. People: We worship superstar.
Patricia Lockwood, poet and writer of the prizewinning memoir “Priestdaddy,” evokes the COVID-19 pandemic’s lengthy tail in her expressionistic autofiction, “Will There Ever Be Another You.”
(Grep Hoax)
“Will There Ever Be Another You” is a portrait of 1 lady’s disaster, not not like Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” however with out her readability and acerbic confidence. Lockwood depicts the trajectory of sickness by way of the type of surrealism that sparked Plath’s “Ariel”; a lot is dependent upon how nicely you soak up the loony-tune Lockwood croons. Patricia enrolls in a welding class as remedy, prompting a little bit of inside monologue: “I melted. I could put a spleen back in a human body. Little bodies, drops of overflow. Something began to spin, the sun was coming out. Creatures and plants were raised upon the earth.” A reader’s endurance could put on skinny. And but there are moments of startling magnificence, akin to Patricia’s commentary throughout lockdown, when the pure world took again its turf from us: “We are the plague, people had said at the beginning, rejoicing over pictures of empty streets, of fish and animals shyly returning to natural habitats — and the further she was removed from the world, the more that she felt it was true, that Nature was healing.”
Experimental authors proceed to push past the boundaries of American realism — Ed Park, Jane Alison and Mark Z. Danielewski come to thoughts — and at her finest Lockwood performs with concord and dissonance in sudden, exhilarating methods. She illuminates lengthy COVID, which has rattled the lives of so many. Her meditations on household and loss resonate. But it surely’s powerful to shake the impression that the guide’s grand quest, Patricia’s try and rescue a self, is self-indulgent and repetitious, spiraling to earth because it tries to soar. “Will There Ever Be Another You” is a combined bag; readers should sift by way of “clods” of ornate prose to pluck nuggets of gold.
Cain is a guide critic and the writer of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
