Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together—of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She's afraid of her own floorboards, and 'What is love? Baby don't hurt me' plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn't know who they are. Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she'll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?
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.
