AMONG THE MYSTERIES: since Patricia Lockwood is an American national treasure, why do I find her stuff in the London Review of Books more often than anywhere else?
Every issue of the LRB devotes its final pages to a “Diary,” which is rarely an actual diary in these post-Alan Bennett times but usually a personal essay. Lockwood got the spot in the December 5, 2024 issue, and somehow spun a dramatically diverse array of topics into a beautifully integrated essay: The X-Files, Phineas Gage (the man who survived a tamping iron being shot through his head in 1823), the medical emergencies of some of her family members, the novels of E. M. Forster, and people convinced they have experienced an alien abduction.
The United States has long needed a Walter Benjamin, and I am starting to think Lockwood could pull it off. She could certainly come up with a contemporary “One Way Street”— Benjamin’s 1928 compilation of wit, parody, observation, and analysis. Lockwood can be hilariously funny but also unbearably poignant; she always has a weather eye open on the zeitgeist and knows the deep truth of any historical moment lies in the apparently trivial.
The first half of No One Is Talking about This has the “One Way Street” feel: confident and vulnerable at the same time, earnest and satirical at the same time, mercurial, breathless, brilliant.
I wonder whether she has plans to collect her short pieces? I would read them all again.
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