In Patricia Lockwood's head-spinning second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, a writer gingerly moves past family tragedies but becomes mired in ill health.
Lockwood's debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, was on the Booker and Women's Prize shortlists and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Both books are effectively third-person autofiction; this sequel picks up after the death of the author's niece in infancy from a rare genetic disease. Still raw and reeling, the family heads overseas, hoping a vacation will be restorative. "As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies," the novel opens. This sets the scene for a chronicle of delusion and the unexplained.
The exceptional chapter "The Changeling" documents a clutch of symptoms, as Patricia becomes increasingly alienated from her body. She has had a fever for 48 days; she has trouble controlling her limbs. But this seems more like a mental health crisis. Memories of her brother PJ's suicide attempt suggest an explanation.
Things keep getting weirder. There is some use of the second person, but the narration mostly shifts into the first person, employing a welter of biblical and literary allusions. Although this doesn't live up to the iconoclastic humor of her poetry (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals) and memoir (Priestdaddy), Lockwood is a queen of one-liners.
As pictures of disordered minds go, this is striking, but also challenging to slog through. It's difficult to find concrete details to latch onto, at least between the bookends of the trips. It's not, perhaps, how newcomers should encounter Lockwood's genius, but still essential for her fans. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck