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.
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.
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The post A Novel That Captures the Agony and Absurdity of Covid Brain Fog appeared first on New York Times.
