How should Covid show up on the page? This strange chapter in recent history is so clearly defined by public health information and government mandates that to depict this world of masks, sanitisations and social distancing is as heavy handed as using webcams as visual shorthand in film and TV.
Those of us forced indoors do not need the dull reminder of this time, when collective cabin fever had us all believing that clapping on our doorsteps meant something. But neither should this recent period be erased from art.
Patricia Lockwood, with her flair for abstract witticisms and unique philosophical musings, might just be the perfect writer to document that unprecedented time. Her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reads like the brainchild of both her memoir Priestdaddy and debut novel No One Is Talking About This, as it borrows from Lockwood’s life while maintaining her novel’s sparse and distracted prose.
Much like her debut novel, Lockwood’s style retains her strange, disconnected voice which is sometimes hard to follow, but this is the author’s plan. As the narrator claims to be attempting to write “a masterpiece about being confused”, Lockwood succeeds in evoking the collective brain fog that affected us all during the years of the pandemic.
Instead of focusing on the tedious and dull aspects however, the book is an accumulation of surprising tangents: everything from cryptids to thoughts on Sylvia Plath or Anna Karenina and even mentions of her priest father’s new obsession with the carnivore diet. Perfectly fitting of an era of confusion in which multiple conspiracies first spread online and have now taken root, despite the world’s supposed return to normal.
Lockwood seemingly effortlessly offers up a novel of a unique stream of consciousness reflective of the modern mind, whose cognitive function, thanks to a scattered attention span, is crumbling like a tea-soaked biscuit.
