What will life be like after Twitter? Perhaps it’s too soon to say, but Lockwood attempts to find out in Will There Ever Be Another You, a claustrophobic travelogue of online and IRL adventures abounding with whimsical interludes, all packed taut with her signature wordplay. Deliriums blend together; fellow authors are characters and subjects; subjects and verbs are scrambled; oblique references are made to Outlander and Amazon.com and Property Brothers, a home-improvement show hosted by twins. As Lockwood flies from Paris to Key West to London, she writes a lyrical and barely legible journal of holy and sacrilegious feelings, a pocketbook emptied out in search of the nation’s plot.
All of this to say, there is little plot in Will There Ever Be Another You. This is a book about a person outside of time who takes shrooms while reading Tolstoy and listening to the Beatles. References to macro and micro world events whiz by. But if one has followed Lockwood’s columns in the London Review of Books, one recalls the basic outline. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, she fell ill with the virus, endured a monthslong fever, and, in her words, went insane. Not long after, runaway success came her way. She almost won the Booker Prize for her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, and her memoir Priestdaddy was optioned by Amazon before swiftly being canceled. Then her husband, Jason, nearly died from his bowels folding over. Then she met Pope Francis.
No One Is Talking About This recounted the communal experience of the internet, and while the new book does not entirely leave that fertile ground, to it Lockwood adds her deeply individual experience of Covid. Twitter may be mort, but Covid, despite our half-hearted efforts, is not. The virus’s outbreak exposed our fractured society’s woes and made clearer than ever the ways in which social media can amplify both connection and misinformation. Some find like-minded allies, while the pain of isolation leads others to radicalization. Some hone their loneliness like a weapon; it’s easier to dunk on someone than to try to talk to them. For Lockwood, the breakdown of our shared vocabulary isn’t surprising—this has always been her focus, the essential weirdness of the words that pass between us. Her ability to tease out the absurdity of ordinary communication is magnificent, even infuriating.
Lockwood’s stand-in comes from a long line of literal mailmen: “Someone in each generation had to be taught the route.” Perhaps she is a new kind of mailman, a purveyor of the bizarre, poetic (mis)information that glitches in the matrix. Her books are postcards from our very recent past, missives by way of Joy Williams if her family argued about the Property Brothers being persecuted for their faith. In fact, Williams crops up as a character, washing onshore in the epilogue wearing black sunglasses, another pilgrim of Key West. After a night out on the town, Lockwood asks a nearby pair of sunglasses if they are, in fact, Joy. No one ever said the profound can’t indulge in a bit of surreal, slapstick humor.
Lockwood is now ambivalent about the career that originally took her away from her family. Before turning to novels, she published two volumes of poetry, and she first gained viral fame as the author of the poem “Rape Joke,” published on The Awl in 2013. But the narrator in Will There Ever Be Another You finds it more and more difficult to write in verse. “You stopped writing poetry?” she imagines a doctor asking. “I could no longer bear … the form,” the narrator replies. Perhaps the quippy decontextualized one-liners of X or Twitter have supplanted the impulse toward verses about Nessie and Hypno-Dommes previously found in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. Now we have the viral tweet from No One Is Talking About This: “Can a dog be twins?”
A thread of grief sutures the disparate sections of Will There Ever Be Another You together. Lockwood is reckoning with her illness, her niece’s death, her father’s aging, Jason’s new vulnerability. This compounded sorrow haunts the book—culminating in a chapter called “The Wound.” After Jason collapses in Heathrow and undergoes surgery, Lockwood’s stand-in becomes obsessed with his wound. It looks just like a vagina. They fight over who owns the gash, worried both that it will disappear and that it will always be there, a reminder of life’s fragility. The narrator wonders when she realizes she can put her whole hand inside of him—likening his wound to the side of Christ. Jason starts to worry that he will wake up and there will be blood on the sheet. He asks if this is what getting a period is like. “That’s what it’s like,” she replies. “The big fear is it would happen in church.”
The problem is that by the time of Will There Ever Be Another You, no one actually is talking about this. After a few years of lock-in angst and political upheaval, irony dominates the online landscape, and no one is interested in sincere expressions of collective experience. Everyone’s moved on to TikTok. Visual media is king. Lockwood’s wild, earnest pleas go unheard. So she splits the difference, attempting to mimic the voice of the confused masses and to make sense of personal tragedy. All too often, grief is fodder for the discourse. Why try to write an account of suffering when it can more easily be a punch line? Lockwood guns for both. (When Jason wakes up from surgery, he is most worried about misgendering his nurse.) This is a kind of dissociative ethic, one that can’t comprehend horror through empathy alone—not unlike the way autofiction creates a wall of plausible deniability. Sometimes the immensity of the polycrisis also requires a laugh.
For Lockwood, the chaos of lockdown doesn’t just mirror the chaos of falling ill; the two experiences are inseparable. This is beyond hysterical realism—it is the fever dream that has become everyday life. Call it the post-Covid blues. Common sense and sensibility have gone out the window. Driving around, Lockwood encounters endless signs reading: “Pray for America” and urgent pleas for kidney donations. The “purest poster” is a sitting president. Lockwood’s avatar notes that her ability to utilize the internet does not make her special. “Just a fortuitous time to have published a book about the internet being the end of the human mind,” she sighs.
Lockwood, however, manages to explicate the harried, nonsensical, grief-soaked timeline with acrobatic skill. Early on, she recounts wearing, while trying to work, “fingerless gloves and an enormous Looney Tunes shirt … tucking it carefully into her cutoffs so that Speedy Gonzalez did not show.” During her sickness, smiling hallucinations begin to swim around on the ceiling:
Names and cultural references become untethered from reality. M&Ms feel like an emotion. Cancel culture, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and presidential hopefuls all do battle for relevance, drowned out by the next shiny new crisis. The disembodied connection between language, technology, and illness is clear.
Lockwood doesn’t seek to answer any of our lingering sex-based questions. A chronicler writes; she does not always unfurl meaning. “I got us here,” Lockwood assures us, “I will get us out.… Do not be afraid.” But one cannot shake the horrible feeling that this is the new normal. “Daily headlines about coronavirus ‘lingering in the penis,’” as Lockwood’s character notes, are small compensation for “the new life” we are “all leading.”
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.
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