Patricia Lockwood, _Will There Ever Be Another You_

 IN A HAPPY coincidence, I was reading this over the same span of weeks that I was reading Leonora Carrington's The Stone Door, and they both appealed to me in the same way. They both had a central idea, a big picture, but the real joy of each book lay in the dazzle of the details, the twists, turns, and leaps that went from one surprising sentence to the next. 

The big picture in Will There Ever Be Another You  deals with the mystery of personal identity. The title sounds like it could be the title of a break-up song--the singer wondering whether she or he will ever find another person they love as much as the lost "you"--and it happens also to be the sentence that was on the cover of the issue of Time magazine that covered the advent of Dolly, the cloned ewe--the pun addressing the question of whether "you," or anyone, could be reproduced exactly. 

In Lockwood's novel, though, the sentence seems to be raising a whole other question: whether the "you" of your self could at some point, say six months from now, be gone with nary a trace, replaced by another "you," your self inhabited by a startlingly different personality.

Something like that apparently happened to Lockwood, possibly the consequence of a case of long COVID, but the beauty of the novel is the complete absence of explanations or even speculations about causes. Somehow, everything has gone weirdly and unpredictably disjunctive, nothing connects very neatly to anything else, and the narration--third person in Part One, first person in Part Two, and in First, third, AND second in Part Three--ricochets from scene to scene without even pretending that it all makes sense or adds up or resolves into unity. It's a wild ride.

A few years ago, I taught Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. The students were baffled by Part One, in which the Lockwood-esque narrator goes down a million internet rabbit-holes at once, but riveted by Part Two, in which the book becomes laser-focused on the narrator's niece, born with a rare and fatal condition called Proteus syndrome. I think these students would find Will There Ever Be Another You frustrating, precisely because it never does focus, never does zoom in on a single story. 

But that may be what I liked most about it. Take the chapter called "Shakespeare's Wife." I have a hunch Lockwood is talking to Jessie Buckley about a proposed film or television adaptation of No One Is Talking About This, but no such explanation ever emerges, and I actually found not knowing why Lockwood was talking to this unnamed actor a little more satisfactory than having things spelled out. Or "Mr. Tolstoy, You're Driving Me Mad," a chapter of scattershot observations about Anna Karenina. No explanation offered here, either, but Anna Karenina also gives us a heroine unable to pull in single focus her own multiplicity, so it works without working...if you see what I mean.

Right at the moment, having just finished the book, I feel like it's her best yet. The characters--her parents, Jason, her sister--seem like old friends at this point, after Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This, and Lockwood seems even more herself in not being herself...if you see what I mean.

And I am glad to see she is publishing poetry again.