Down The Rabbit Hole: On Patricia Lockwood

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I

Have we as a culture moved on from the phenomenon of the “internet novel”? Each time I think the answer is a firm and resounding “yes,” the discourse is for some reason or the other renewed, and the cycle continues and repeats itself. The subject has been a recurrent one in my memory for the past half decade, but a cursory search reveals its origins likely lie even further back to the early 2010s, a full decade removed. I suppose it should be unsurprising that the “internet novel” discourse has itself fallen victim to the internet machine–fading into the rearview in memory as quickly as it arose, only to be spat up, churned out, and discussed to the ground again after a certain number of months have passed, during which time the contemporary literary landscape has proffered several more titles to the ever-growing internet novel canon. 

Of this contemporary literary output of the past five years that I have been privy to, the novel that most stands out among the fold is Patricia Lockwood’s highly lauded No One is Talking About This. In her debut fiction effort after a successful career as a poet and memoirist, Lockwood’s autofictionalized narrator invites the reader to join her in the internet, referred to in the novel’s pages as “the portal,” from her position in its gaping maw. In its first part, the novel is eerily successful in producing a simulacrum of the experience of scrolling the internet. Narrated in a pattern of staccato bursts that simulate “posts,” the rhythm of the text is disjointed and clipped, with brief stanzas that bounce between subjects with ease–the reader is pulled along for the ride, and hardly has a moment to catch their breath before the text moves on, careening down its chaotic and uncertain path. 

The stanzas come together to form chapters, and the narrative, though a stream of consciousness in mimicry of a scroll down the Instagram or Twitter timeline, is far from continuous. The narrative experience of the portal is a mixture that includes hyperspecific internet meme reference, including those of a slightly earlier internet age (see: the incestuous Folgers ad mentioned in the chapter that takes place during Christmastime). Mingling with the memes are current events, including the ever looming threat of climate change, Brexit, Trump’s first term in the U.S. presidency, and the ever growing strength of woke culture. Undercutting it all is Lockwood’s signature biting and dark humor–“Had she committed a Brexit? It was so easy these days to accidentally commit a Brexit.”  

The narrator, supposedly a social media sensation herself, remains constantly in transit. Both in the physical realm of space as she flits from location to location, from one interview or speaking appearance to another, and in the realm of the portal, which beckons her deeper into its clutches as the first part of the novel progresses and the aforementioned “existential threats” of reality grow stauncher and more solid. The nature of the narration recreates for the reader not only the experience of spending time on the internet, but the brain and attention breaking consequences of spending time on the internet. (Even in sitting down to write this piece I caught myself setting the bigger screen of my laptop aside so as to scroll on the smaller screen of my phone for no understandable reason, seeking and finding nothing in particular.) Through encounters with her family members and loved ones, the narrator is briefly reminded of the pleasures to be found in life outside of the portal, remaining grounded in an outer reality despite her otherwise total immersion in the portal. Frequent mentions are made of her partner; “She and her husband would often text each other throughout the day to say Glitch.” During the Christmastime chapter, her sister’s pregnancy reminds her that “there was still a real life to be lived; there were still real things to be done.”  

In part 2 the narrator is rather rudely and abruptly deposited back into the grasp of reality when her sister’s pregnancy develops complications–the baby is growing too large too quickly, threatening her mother’s life and diminishing her chances of survival outside of the womb. Because she lives in a red state, termination of the pregnancy isn’t once suggested; the brain breaking recurs here again even outside the portal: 

“‘Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,’ the doctors told them.”  

The baby is hardwired to continue growing at an exponential rate, the family’s lives are at the whims of the conservative laws of the state of Ohio, where despite this pressing medical condition the doctors won’t be able to induce labor early. The narrator reflects that the baby, “because of this vigor and this wheeling and this insistence…felt more fitted to life than the rest of them–she was what life was, a grand and unexpected overreach.” The family resides in a state of prolonged crisis, an existential limbo that becomes their “shared reality.” The child, who the doctors never expected to survive, lives long enough to see Disneyland and play patty cake. When she is six months and one day old, she succumbs to her genetic code, plunging the family into a deep grief–the sheen of the portal no longer holds the same allure for the narrator, and she is forever severed from her previous online existence.

For all its dizzying experimentation, No One is Talking About This charts a clear narrative path–the narrator is lost in the portal until her sister’s pregnancy and the subsequent arrival of the child return her to reality. Parts one and two exist in complete harmony, wrapped neatly with a bow. But just as the novel and its narrator are sobered by the complexities of life and death, so the reader is grounded by a particular quality of sentiment, a recognizable emotional core to the book that is deeply touching and easy to connect with, rendering the book legible even to those outside of the portal.

II

Though not a sequel as such, Lockwood’s follow up novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, released this past September, picks up where her debut left off in time, further pushing the boundaries of the novel as form while expanding upon No One’s themes. Will There proves to be every bit as inscrutable as No One was neat. When it came out, I knew people who were less keen on Lockwood’s debut than I was, finding it saccharine and cloying–I believe “twee” might also have been said. As a result it brings me great joy to proclaim that, with her second book, Lockwood is undeniably beating the twee allegations. Her signature humor and quirk are present, the text remains littered with references to literature and pop culture phenomena alike, but the novel is a confounding one that presents itself to the reader almost as a puzzle, the paragraphs and chapters further disconnected from one another. 

The novel opens with a family trip to the Scottish faerie pools, with the intent to distract from the ongoing pain and grief of losing the narrator’s niece, here referred to as “the Child.” After drinking self-filtered water from the pools, the narrator falls ill–a previous iteration of the greater illness yet to come. She experiences this illness as “the feeling that she was not quite herself” which comes paired with an inability to express herself in words, a “problem with all language.” As the book progresses, and the thinly veiled but never directly named global pandemic breaks out, this loss of language is further experienced as an inability to write, a fragmentation of the narrator’s identity as a writer and thus her sense of self. She loses her ability to read and grasp narrative, is left wondering: “Who am I” and “what do I do?”  In a literal feverish state, her fever lasting forty-eight days straight, she wonders if the disease has given her a blank slate brain, in a sense giving her a newfound selfhood. She tells a doctor that everything “felt like drag to her.”  

In opposition to the clear thread of “narrator is in the portal and pulled out of it by emergency family situation” that No One plots, Will There has been described in one review as “barely plotted.” But arguably this is precisely the novel’s point–the narrator, unmoored from the English language, from writing, from self, has quite simply lost the plot. The reader is left to pick up its pieces, should they wish, to tease sense out of the discordant noise. Will There Ever Be Another You, the title taken from a TIME magazine cover featuring the infamous cloned sheep Dolly, presents itself as an outward facing question when it is in fact an inwardly facing one. Will she be able to reconstruct a sense of self, and would the reader be able to do the same? 

Life trucks on in the aftermath of her debut for the narrator amidst her struggle with long COVID. The great irony of No One is Talking About This is of course that, for a moment, seemingly everyone was talking about it. She flies to the UK for the Booker prize ceremony, continues to lecture on the “portal” and life inside it, all while attempting to rebuild from scratch. Her body has been replaced with one plagued by illness, her self has been replaced by illness itself. Lockwood joins and aligns herself with a tradition of illness writing, including recent entrants: references are made to Hanif Kureishi’s blog charting his recovery from a fall in 2022 that left him paralyzed, and a stylized Anne Carson appears in the text by name. Reading the book I was immediately reminded of a recent essay from Carson documenting the impact of her Parkinson’s symptoms on the physical process of her writing, on her handwriting and penmanship itself–which many claim to reflect upon a person’s character, but which she can no longer recognize as her own. How terrifying it must be, to not recognize one’s own words, the mark of one’s hand, and yet Carson has persisted in writing regardless.

The narrator is painfully aware of the illness writing that precedes her, that “to write about being ill was self-indulgent,” which makes being ill “the most self-indulgent thing of all,”  yet she is determined to “write a masterpiece about being confused” regardless. Words are constantly eluding her, on the tip of her tongue yet out of grasp, dancing just out of reach. She keeps journals in secret of her experience of the illness, ashamed to be writing about it at all. She wonders if she “could start over” in a language other than English; years into her long COVID journey she experiences a breakthrough by watching K-Dramas. The new language allows her to grasp narrative and recognize faces again, to “follow” the thread of a show; she begins to pick up Korean phrases incidentally, as if her brain has been restored to its early childhood state of plasticity. In the breaking of the original self, the tethers to English, the “unzipping [of] the body and stepping out,”  a new self is able to emerge.

In her 1986 short story “The Way We Live Now,” Susan Sontag charts the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in New York City through fragmented conversation between an afflicted patient and the friends in his circle. Lockwood quotes a large swath of this story in Will There, including the following quote: “I feel so, I don’t know how to say it, exalted, he said to Quentin…I know it sounds crazy but sometimes I think this is a fantastic experience, he said shyly.” The narrator’s own dreams have become crazy; she reads about the crazy dreams of others and their equally crazy measures at countering the virus online. The text here is presented in not quite vignettes, fragments which are loosely constructed from even more fragments, pushing the reading experience of “brain breaking” first encountered in No One into nearly unworkable levels of discordance, reading like a feverish dream. The reader is beholden to the narrator’s whims; it is a novel that demands a certain willingness to submit oneself to the writer and narrator in question, to play the passenger along for the ride. A  reminder that not all texts exist to be understood, and that their true meaning could reside in their ultimate inability to be comprehensibly read.

It is fitting that Lockwood has quoted from this particular Sontag story, as the novel’s feverish quality feels oriented toward a different sacred text of the AIDS epidemic–the 2003 miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play, Angels in America. The best time to consume such a sacred text is, of course, twenty plus years on from its release, when quite literally no one is still talking about it, so that one can rediscover its greatness for oneself, separate from the chorusline of praise and criticism that accompanies contemporary television. And so I found myself watching the series for the first time simultaneous to my first reading of this novel, in July, and being struck by the notion of placing the two in conversation. (Because, after all, it feels like no one is talking about Angels!) Angels is peppered across its six glorious episodes with dream sequences and hallucinations, its characters, sick with addiction and the AIDS virus, are brought closer to the heavens through communication with the “angels” of its title, who appear to them in the throes of illness. Sections of Will There read as though they have been transplanted from an otherworldly dream–the narrator experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms to attempt to rewire her broken English brain, stumbling into an extended reflection on Tolstoy and Anna Karenina seemingly transcribed from one of her many notebook journals that is of course presented for the reader’s own perusal. She remembers her previous attempt to read the novel while experiencing it again under the influence of shrooms; her bodily and mental experience of reading becomes inextricably linked to the novel as her thoughts on language and reading collide with her thoughts on the book and its characters. She sways between topics and themes in short bursts and has revelations that feel close to spiritual. Much like the characters of Kushner’s text, the narrator over the course of the text grows closer to unlocking the key to reclaiming her sense of self, closer to unlocking an unmovable truth about selfhood and its very construction.

Even upon multiple readings, sections of Lockwood’s text remain impenetrable to me, particularly in its third part, which finds the narrator receding into a supportive role as her husband is thrown into the role of patient. The resultant wound of her husband’s abdominal surgery and subsequent reopening and restitching becomes the narrator’s task; her husband tells her that she’s in charge of it. Tending to the Wound and caring for her husband provide the narrator with a clear newfound purpose, much like in No One when she insists on devoting available minutes and hours to her niece because even these short increments of time will matter more to her in her short life. Being there, for a spouse or family member, is another way of defining the self, particularly the self in relation to others. Amidst tending to the Wound, the narrator picks up a practice of metalworking; separate from the Wound, in this portion of the novel she contemplates the role of a biographer and finds herself in Paris for a residency; she commences with a ranking of the arts with descriptions that become further abstracted and less revealing of their secrets–the meaning making in this final section continues to elude me, the book continues to present itself as a puzzle, and one not entirely meant to be solved.

Inscrutable though it may be, the narrator’s experiments in life which shine through in the novel’s form are a way in which the novel acts as a record of its own writing. As early as the faerie pool section, the narrator reflects on how she is “obsessively revising” the same “150 words she had written about this experience.”  Later, when she goes to write about the Wound, about “what it was like,” she realizes that “it was not like that at all.” With the dissolution of the self comes a dissolution of faith in the instincts of the self, particularly the writing instincts of the self, for how can one be trusted with a language that one has lost? These brief glimmers reveal the hand behind the text, the difficulty that must have come with writing the text as Lockwood herself struggled with a particularly potent bout of the raging global illness. 

Sequel though it may not be, the truth of Will There may rightfully be found within the pages of No One: 

“That these disconnections were what kept the pages turning, that these blank spaces were what moved the plot forward. The plot! That was a laugh.” 

If you take this as your entry point into a reading of Will There, you realize that the novel is shaped by the reader in that it is formed, perhaps more so than other texts, only by the reader’s progression through the text: a notion that is a fundamental truth of the act of reading. A novel of assemblage, of words placed together into sentences placed together into paragraphs, united into chapters. It is declared a novel only upon completion, presenting itself as a hybridized form of reflections on illness, attempts at regrasping language, efforts to keep a family afloat in the wake of a tragic loss. 

And so in presenting this model for the novel, the novel similarly presents a model for selfhood–of the self as constantly changing, being constructed and reconstructed, as new experiences are layered onto one’s personal conception of the self and identity. There might just be another you down the line, the novel offers, should you fall into unforeseen circumstances of severe illness, or actively choose to construct one. Difficult and cryptic though it may be at times, Will There Ever Be Another You anticipates an engaged and willing reader, one willing to tease through its layers to discover a truth of their own amidst its poetic sentences and insights into the condition of chronic illness. And for the willing reader it offers a positive feast of wonder and charm, one hardly seen and not easily replicated in the contemporary literary landscape of the post-COVID and post-Internet age.