Patricia Lockwood’s Completely Singular Covid Novel
Some experiences, some books, are not meant to be picked apart. They are watercolor gouaches that wash over us as we delight in a palimpsest of colorful impressions. Patricia Lockwood’s body of work is like this: a hymn—or ode, depending on the day—to the painful project of being human. Her pandemic travels offer glimpses of our shared vulnerabilities as “a shoal of fragile colors assembling.”
Will There Ever Be Another You harnesses the power of doubles to remind us of how porous our identities really are, how quickly they can fall apart and come back different. Like a zombie, like a lobotomized doppelgänger. There is Patricia the writer and Patricia the character, Patricia and Dennis, reality and television. The novel begins with an allusion to changelings, children taken and left by mischievous fairies, while the book’s title is taken from an old issue of Time magazine that featured cloned sheep. The uncanny double follows Lockwood throughout her travels, as she struggles to differentiate the real from the shadow, the profound from the mundane. Lockwood hopes to recover from her illness unscathed, but she finds that there is, in fact, another her.
For all its focus on herself, this novel, Lockwood insists, “takes place on the world stage.” Jason’s wound is not just a yonic stand-in, it’s a portal. Tenderness opens us up. Global catastrophe can calcify our isolationism or allow us to take refuge in the breakdown, as, Lockwood reads from Joy Williams’s Florida guidebook, “Fish would use disasters as temporary reefs.” There is a holiness to some moments, she reflects, where one thinks, “After this I will be able to be nice to my mother.” The problem, of course, is that the feeling slithers away. It’s all too easy to become numb to disasters and wounds, to scroll endlessly online and snip at one’s loved ones. But that individualism, like the opposite communal feeling, does not need to last forever. The world stage welcomes us, players one and all, with our entrances and exits. We cannot go back to how things once were. Sans Property Brothers, sans Twitter, sans everything. We will have to settle for reading a book about what it all was like.
