A claustrophobic travelogue of online and IRL adventures abounding with whimsical interludes, all packed taut with her signature wordplay ... She writes a lyrical and barely legible journal of holy and sacrilegious feelings, a pocketbook emptied out in search of the nation’s plot ... So singular ... Her ability to tease out the absurdity of ordinary communication is magnificent, even infuriating ... Compounded sorrow haunts the book ... Lockwood...manages to explicate the harried, nonsensical, grief-soaked timeline with acrobatic skill.
Febrile, poetic ... What she’s produced is a searching, pointedly disorienting text, studded with passages of extreme beauty and generous humor, that wears whimsy like a shivering veil over consuming discomfort, even terror. It is less consummately pleasurable, page by page, than No One; it is uneven; occasionally it drags. But because it is a work that seeks to capture the deranging effects of the recent past, confusion is a powerful lens ... Turning over the last page, I asked with pleasure, What was that?
The insanity has not been edited out. This contributes to the novel’s surrealism and its gently awkward fuzziness...and also to its not inconsiderable weight and charm ... I suspect it will divide her many readers. It divided me. It lacks the sustained barrage of audacities and rascalities that defined her last novel ... The aphorisms in her new novel are not as keen, and the leaves are not raked into piles. Yet this elliptical book, often best read as poetry, can be involving and moving, and it has sharp spikes of observation ... Her writing about her public persona can also, in this novel, drift into a procession of dream-logic sentences. Her brain is no longer a sequential processor; the cheese is sliding off the cracker ... I have poked and prodded at this book because it’s the sort that invites a reader to do so. It’s a mixed success. But as a member of the rabble that likes to read novels, especially ones by writers so adept, I can’t help remaining committed to following Lockwood where she leads.
Heavy, often ponderously existential, story lines, but Lockwood’s characteristic whimsy lightens them ... Recapturing the trick that makes her tick is a convoluted journey for Patricia, and occasionally the reader ... Lockwood shows that giving in by lavishing love or solicitation on despair, depression, or disease is never the right option, because there never will be another you.
Not a bisection of digital life and supposedly realer, more concrete events. Instead, it’s a portrait of a time when both sorts of experience, equally meaningful, shape us, melt us down and reshape us.
Uneven ... The action is blurred, her characters faceless as mannequins ... Lockwood deploys an associative strategy: anecdotes, memories and social commentary string together, rich and kinetic if confusing ... A mixed bag; readers must sift through 'clods' of ornate prose to pluck nuggets of gold.
Humorous and autobiographical ... Such flourishes can be a bit wooly, but they introduce a strangely slanted and alluringly palpable form of perception, charmed by its unusual associations and by Ms. Lockwood’s perennially manic sense of humor. The trouble is that most of the best writing is concentrated in the first few chapters ... A lot of this is funny, it should be repeated, as Ms. Lockwood is tirelessly vamping and ridiculous ... But as the riffing and private references mount up, it becomes impossible to ignore that Ms. Lockwood has all but ceased to develop the originating conceit of a woman who has lost hold of her mind ... A book that seemed to aspire to something visionary settles for being quirky.
The novel wanders through Lockwood’s disorientation in chapters jungly with bewildering language that occasionally open out into exhilarating clearings ... Lockwood is never not funny—that knack, it seems, is impervious to viruses ... Considerably more challenging than her other books. Many of its sentences have the aura of marvels but don’t make much sense ... If anyone could do it, surely it would be her, a nimble wit whose language-bending eccentricities reliably set off little explosions in the reader’s mind and never become labored. And sometimes she does pull it off.
[Lockwood's] deft manipulation of form and language captures how alien—even, perhaps, how interesting—ordinary life with a chronic illness, in some cases, can be ... Particularly open-minded ... Long COVID seems to defamiliarize the narrator’s relationship to language in ways both fascinating and isolating ... Lockwood, for one, refuses to sum her story up neatly ... Lockwood is an alchemist, handling her own experiences with careful attention, ready to fashion them into something new.
The result is cortical shrapnel – you can almost hear this book rattle when you open it ... There is a new kind of anguish here, a longing for coherence ... The opening pages are where she comes closest ... Lockwood’s detonated form is evocative, but not especially innovative ... We need accounts of long Covid, and plenty more of them. But Will There Ever Be Another You feels auteurish, the literary equivalent of a Wes Anderson film: over-styled and perilously close to self-parody. A delirious in-joke ... How you read it – how you are able to read it – depends on your relationship to Lockwood. And this book assumes you already have one.
Lockwood can drop a blindingly good one-liner and she shoots for three or four a page ... But unless you’re a Lockwood fan, you will...feel that this book was written for...Someone Who Isn’t Me ... The vibe of Will There Ever Be Another You is less that of a literary novel and more that of a Netflix comedy special ... The novel depends for many of its effects almost entirely on off-page context.
Looks deceptively like an ordinary series of essays but reads more like a chaotic tornado of fuzzy recollections from her life and hallucinatory theories about the nature of existence and the inscrutability of the self. There are mighty, imposing sentences or turns of phrase that wrap you up, spit you out and leave you either scratching your chin or floored by their cleverness — or both ... Feverish and frenetic ... A Pandora’s box that feels at once totally brilliant and frustratingly elusive ... Littered with Lockwood’s signature wit despite her gnarly circumstances ... Visceral ... Yet despite how poetic, moving and paradoxically grounding these meditations on illness are — some of the most perceptive and accurate descriptions I’ve read thus far of what it actually feels like to have long COVID, in fact — there’s also a lot of clutter and minutiae in these pages that distract from the book’s overall impact ... Will There Ever Be Another You is not the type of book one reads straight through in one sitting — not by a long shot. Still, it’s a wild, devilishly curious, often hallucinatory ride that’s worth its weight in insights, even if some are slightly intangible.
Disorienting and even disjointed ... Mimicking her character’s bewilderment, however, this novel is indeed confusing and only barely plotted. The joy of it is in Lockwood’s expansive imagination and steady command of humor, devastation, and the fine line between them.
Lockwood started out as a poet and the novel is littered with witty visual comparisons ... These images are mostly funny, but occasionally Lockwood veers into the plainly wacky ... Will There Ever Be Another You has confirmed Lockwood’s place as a major contemporary writer ... Here is the poetic insight of Anne Carson, the intellectual curiosity of Ben Lerner, and the cloacal humour of Patricia Lockwood.
There are plenty of striking things in Will There Ever Be Another You ... Lockwood is generally good on other people, and especially on her father, who continues to provide richly comedic material ... I loved reading Lockwood on Anna Karenina ... Often moving and comparatively lucid ... She is offering up a bag of scraps – some beautiful, some funny, some maddeningly solipsistic, some near-incomprehensible ... It’s OK to make the reader work to understand, but the payoff has to be worth it. Lockwood, presumably, thinks the payoff here is worth it ... Patricia Lockwood always has arresting things to say, and Will There Ever Be Another You is full of them. But she has not managed to turn this bag of scraps into a novel – or a pineapple, or a chandelier.
Everything is unclear in Lockwood’s new novel and this is kind of the point ... Often the results are funny ... There are also moments of revelation, even profundity ... But this madness leads nowhere ... The problem with Will There Ever Be Another You is that beneath the jokes, the irony and the frenzied literary criticism, there is nothing much at all.
Head-spinning ... As pictures of disordered minds go, this is striking, but also challenging to slog through. It's difficult to find concrete details to latch onto, at least between the bookends of the trips. It's not, perhaps, how newcomers should encounter Lockwood's genius, but still essential for her fans.
