Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood
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Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood, Bloomsbury, 2025, 256 pages, £16.99
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Like her debut, Patricia Lockwood’s new novel Will There Ever Be Another You opens with a 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.’
And yet its narrator is a writer named Patricia. She has a sister who has recently lost a child, a priest for a father, a husband who has survived terrifying medical emergencies and she once cried when John Lanchester quoted King Lear at an event: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ You could turn to The Guardian’s 2022 conversation between Sally Rooney and Lockwood to read more about Jason’s (Lockwood’s husband) medical crises, or watch the London Review of Books’ YouTube recording where Lanchester speaks from his book-lined study and Lockwood, in hers, fights tears as Lear is recited. You could do all of this and more, or you could simply accept the disclaimer and read the story as a fable.
In many ways, Will There Ever Be Another You continues the themes of Lockwood’s first novel, and in doing so continues her larger project: living a life and writing it. If you pinned her novels to a corkboard and traced their plot points against Lockwood’s own biography – her interviews, essays, criticism and her acclaimed memoir, Priestdaddy – the lines would tangle and overlap until they formed a kind of tapestry. Step back, and the figure staring out would look uncannily like Patricia Lockwood herself.
In very simple terms, what happens in this book is a pandemic. Covid, unnamed, stalks hauntingly throughout the narrative and infects the narrator herself: ‘Sometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions’. The narrator gets infected early on and she tries to navigate the physical effects of the virus, the ramifications of a world in shut down and a busy professional life with several creative projects actively on the go. While she balances her professional projects, such as a screenplay (being adapted from one of her books), events (in person and online depending on the stage of the pandemic), she is also dealing with very real crises in her family unit. Her sister has recently lost a child and her husband experiences a medical emergency and undergoes a surgery that goes wrong. In the aftermath of these crises, she grapples with grief and care: negotiating the loss of her niece and attending to her fragile husband, who now has a large wound in the middle of his body.
The novel starts in the Fairy Pools of Scotland with the grieving family. In the early pages we learn that the trip is a type of escape: ‘Her sister sat apart from her in the rental car. Her head was full of the Child, lost to them all just that January.’ We move from the Fairy Pools to the pandemic, to hospital rooms and podcast recordings, to the narrator reading ‘reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died’. The narrator tutors her niece named Angel and assigns Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles as reading material. She takes a metal working class, cares for her husband’s wound, works on the script and goes to Paris.
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It is undeniable that Lockwood is a brilliant writer, but also, she is very funny. There is a beauty to her writing and at the same time a mad hilarity: ‘As a child she had watched Kevin Costner drinking his own freshly distilled piss in Waterworld and just assumed it was something she would have to do as an adult, for the world would be different.’ In a section where the narrator is trying to write about the ‘lingering effects of the virus’ she discusses being aphasic, as in having a language disorder that disrupts communication. Aphasia is an interesting framework to think about Lockwood – and specifically this new book – within: the pieces are there and familiar, but somehow arranged to be new and in places unrecognisable. At the same time as she invents her own genre, she re-orders language and it becomes something new: she is an architect, but one of imagination, constructing rooms and landscapes within the reader’s mind while she writes. ‘What was under her legs now, what was carrying her to the bed – it was the old mistaken movement of the word moor’ – herein lies a senseless beauty and logic. This is a world where a force is ‘pushing back the half-moon of the hour’ and we are grateful for it.
Towards the end of the novel the narrator is in Paris, visiting Musée D’Orsay where the ‘The Origin of the World had been removed for a loan’. She looks at the painting in the brochure instead and posits: ‘That was what realism was, the thing that was there and almost no one ever painted.’ This might also be what Patricia Lockwood is doing with her writing: taking the real and slipping it through genres in her efforts to capture it, resulting in a portrayal more authentic than straight fiction or memoir.
In Paris the narrator thinks about Anne Carson: ‘I have a contract with the light, Anne Carson said, to describe it every morning.’ If Anne Carson has a contract with the light, Patricia Lockwood has a contract with material. At one point the narrator is being interviewed by an unnamed woman: ‘It is like levitating, I told the woman, being help up to the light, when she asked what it was like for me to think through other people, so intensely that you almost became them. Perfect happiness, I said, swallowing hard, and it had been – homework for the rest of my life.’ In the following chapter while working on ‘the show’ the narrator reflects, ‘How terrible to be condemned to live life twice, to look on everything as Material.’ Living life twice, once in person, once in or through ‘fiction’. Lockwood’s homework is the book that we are reading.
Will There Ever Be Another You contains three parts and epilogue. It also contains a body of criticism, a memoir and a novel before it. It’s about the ramifications of loss and illness but also a crisis of identity – as in identifying oneself as a human being floating or flying through the world, ‘People lived their own lives, that was the thing that surprised her. They had nothing to do but live their own lives.’
The book ends on a beach, pelicans flying overhead and ‘the sound of the wind like something already in the body’. The narrator’s husband, no longer near-death in a hospital room, takes his shirt off, ‘unmindful of the scar, which in this context of long weathering just looked like an event – as if a tree surgeon might indicate that particular ring and say: Something happened here … Did a thing to be glimpsed – health, illness, sanity – maintain its solidity from moment to moment?’ We are a page away from the end of the book, with the sense of having glimpsed something profound happen. The final sentence is a line from a guidebook: ‘fish would use disasters as temporary reefs’. Disasters as shelter; Fairy Pools as an escape from grief, from life.
In an earlier chapter entitled, The Artist is Present, the narrator is navigating press about her book, the Capitol is being stormed and she is thinking about memory: ‘Memories that are allowed to run on inside you contain a vascular velvet, a receptive lushness that stirs with the grass, air in every pore. But what am I thinking about? Maybe if I hadn’t written about my niece I wouldn’t have anything to hold on to at all.’ Much later, a different niece, Angel, is trying on a lemon necklace that the narrator made in her metal class: ‘It swung from her neck in fresh slices … Her other hand she had snuck into mine. She did not touch people, this had never happened before. I was missing, it did not matter, the last lesson on clasps.’ She is missing the lesson on holding things together while an Angel, a real one, a niece but not the one she lost, is holding her hand. While this novel contains multitudes, it feels to me in many ways like a spiritual exercise in resistance – to form and genre – but also an exercise in celebration of the general notions of capacity, glimpsing, clasps and hope. We can miss things Lockwood seems to say, we can get things wrong – we can mistake the disaster for a shelter and still move through it.
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Photo credit: Grep Hoax.
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay is a writer based in London.
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