Literary Review
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Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99)
THE idea that Anglo-American “literary” fiction has lost the plot (in more senses that one) has been gaining traction in recent months. It was propelled a little further down the line just the other week by Booker chairman Roddy Doyle’s claim that of the 150 novels submitted to this year’s iteration of the prize, perhaps a fifth had any discernible merit; and now with the appearance of Patricia Lockwood’s dazzling new work it may just have fetched up at the terminus on Grand Central Station.
Ms Lockwood, in case you didn’t know, is just about the most fashionable young Yankee scrivener on the block, gets profiled in the New Yorker, has a regular gig on the London Review of Books and is taken very seriously indeed by taste-brokers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her new one starts with its novelist heroine taking a trip to Scotland with her mother, sister and husband, coming over all strange and then going down with what appears to be long Covid, a version so debilitating she hallucinates, fixates and – terrifyingly for a writer – loses her linguistic bearings.