‘Will There Ever Be One other You’ evaluate: Patricia Lockwood on COVID

Some years in the past, I used to be interviewing a Columbia neurologist for a possible article on imaging. After a tour of her laboratory and MRI scanner, dialogue concerning the frontal cortex and the mysteries of synapses, she supplied a easy declarative sentence: “We are our brains.” I recalled her pithy remark all through the COVID-19 pandemic, as scientific proof emerged that the virus had focused our brains, amongst different organs, leaving a organic marker on many (most?) of these contaminated by SARS-CoV-2 (the official identify for the virus, distinguishing it from the illness). The proof consists of heightened danger for stroke, breaching of the blood-brain barrier and “mind fog,” which may linger for months.

Patricia Lockwood, poet and writer of the prizewinning memoir “Priestdaddy,” evokes the pandemic’s lengthy tail in her expressionistic autofiction, “Will There Ever Be One other You,” recounting mind-altering results on her protagonist, “Patricia,” as she and her husband quarantine in Savannah, Ga., through the preliminary 2020 outbreak and subsequent surges. A author, Patricia printed a confessional work about her household that she is adapting right into a screenplay; as her prolonged sickness kicks in, she finds it troublesome to craft something of advantage. She writes snatches of description and dialogue in her journal, however when she reads them later, her phrases jumble like hieroglyphs. She’s distracted by intrusive ideas, sentence fragments, out-of-the-blue hallucinations, even her personal fraught relationships, putting the blame on SARS-CoV-2: “It has come all this fashion, she thought, cradling the factor in her chest; has handed by means of the palms of invention or probability, white lab coats, moist markets, the gates of the zoo … to land in her squarely, like love!” Like Sylvia Plath in her very good poem, “Fever 103,” Patricia struggles with fluctuating temperatures and a sluggishness she connects to her artwork: “In a narrative, fever was one thing that moved you alongside, sped up time, or made it completely different, parted the curtain for some ray of revelation — maybe that’s why the world had determined to have one, so it may have a dream by which all of the folks had been there.”

“Will There Ever Be One other You” drapes a veil over a throughline — sometimes it appears Lockwood has trashed the idea of narrative arc in a match of pique, as she leaps from setting to setting (Scotland, Cincinnati, coastal Georgia), with uneven outcomes. The motion is blurred, her characters faceless as mannequins. Patricia’s husband intervenes valiantly to assist her, lending coloration and wit to her predicament, however we suspect he can’t save her. There are fastened factors, although: hospitals, spiritual anguish, scenes along with her quirky household, a fierce need to reclaim her writing life. They add as much as an erasure of self, its that means elusive: “This was a cardinal sin; you possibly can not develop into within the sickness. You possibly can not lavish on it the love and solicitation you had beforehand lavished on the self, regardless that it was the factor the self was changed by.”

From chapter to chapter, Lockwood deploys an associative technique: anecdotes, reminiscences and social commentary string collectively, wealthy and kinetic if complicated. Patricia is each invested in and disengaged from her personal psychological well being and her husband’s medical challenges. Motifs of motherhood shift out and in of view; are the tragedies precise or fever-fantasy? Some jokes hit their marks; others fall flat. Lockwood piles on literary and standard tradition references. William Carlos Williams, “Anna Karenina,” Katherine Anne Porter, “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Cats,” Foghorn Leghorn: all get shoutouts right here, a collective misery name that fails to maneuver us. Patricia additionally bogs down within the particulars of translating her earlier e book right into a Hollywood screenplay, with Kurt Russell eager on the a part of her father. Individuals: We worship celeb.

“Will There Ever Be One other You” is a portrait of 1 girl’s disaster, not in contrast to Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” however with out her readability and acerbic confidence. Lockwood depicts the trajectory of sickness by means of the form of surrealism that sparked Plath’s “Ariel”; a lot is determined by how nicely you soak up the loony-tune Lockwood croons. Patricia enrolls in a welding class as remedy, prompting a little bit of inner monologue: “I melted. I may put a spleen again in a human physique. Little our bodies, drops of overflow. One thing started to spin, the solar was popping out. Creatures and crops had been raised upon the earth.” A reader’s endurance could put on skinny. And but there are moments of startling magnificence, corresponding to Patricia’s commentary throughout lockdown, when the pure world took again its turf from us: “We’re the plague, folks had stated firstly, rejoicing over footage of empty streets, of fish and animals shyly returning to pure habitats — and the additional she was faraway from the world, the extra that she felt it was true, that Nature was therapeutic.”

Experimental authors proceed to push past the boundaries of American realism — Ed Park, Jane Alison and Mark Z. Danielewski come to thoughts — and at her greatest Lockwood performs with concord and dissonance in sudden, exhilarating methods. She illuminates lengthy COVID, which has rattled the lives of so many. Her meditations on household and loss resonate. However it’s robust to shake the impression that the e book’s grand quest, Patricia’s try and rescue a self, is self-indulgent and repetitious, spiraling to earth because it tries to soar. “Will There Ever Be One other You” is a blended bag; readers should sift by means of “clods” of ornate prose to pluck nuggets of gold.

Cain is a e book critic and the writer of a memoir, “This Boy’s Religion: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.