The audience for popular artforms has long since been balkanised into a constellation of hermetic fandoms, giving rise to a specifically contemporary feeling: I mean the feeling of encountering a work of art that is clearly not meant for you. It’s the feeling you get when you watch a new superhero movie (if you can still bring yourself to do that).
Events and allusions float past. They mean something to the fans. But you are not a fan. You do your best to take the thing on its own terms. But its own terms are those of the fandom. No general audience is envisioned. Somewhere, in another livingroom, scrolling on another phone, is the ideal viewer of this movie. But that ideal viewer isn’t you.
It was probably inevitable that this would start to happen to literature, too. But it’s still dismaying to see it actually occur. Patricia Lockwood, the literary internet’s favourite writer, might be the wave of the future. You, the general reader, can certainly read her new novel. You might even get something out of it – Lockwood can drop a blindingly good one-liner and she shoots for three or four a page (she was initially celebrated for being very, very good at Twitter). But unless you’re a Lockwood fan, you will, as you read, feel that specifically contemporary feeling: that this book was written for, as they say on the advice boards, Someone Who Isn’t Me.
Fans will certainly greet with a warm thrill of recognition the appearance on the novel’s very first page of “my husband”, a recurring minor character in the Lockwood universe (even a near-fatal bowel problem doesn’t quite bump him up to major character status in the new one). Fans will also surely be moved by fresh news of Lockwood’s sister, who, in the most moving pages of Lockwood’s previous novel, No One Is Talking about This (2021), lost her infant daughter to Proteus Syndrome. Non-fans, alas, will have to do some googling.
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Note that the idea that Lockwood is a genius has been smuggled into her text and not contradicted
And herein lies the fandom snag. Will There Ever Be Another You quite blithely assumes that you have read No One Is Talking About This. It also assumes that you have read Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy (2017) and Lockwood’s ongoing series of Diary pieces for the London Review of Books, in which she keeps her fans updated on her experiences with long Covid and the various travails of her family. In other words, here is a novel that takes absolutely for granted that you know who Patricia Lockwood is, and that you will be on her side as she navigates, with wisecracks, coded riffs, and surrealist musings, various ideas about illness and the self.
Only a writer absolutely assured of a loyal fandom could possibly risk assuming this much. The vibe of Will There Ever Be Another You is less that of a literary novel and more that of a Netflix comedy special. And if you haven’t seen this particular comedian’s previous Netflix comedy special, you’ll spend a lot of time at sea – no matter how gamely you try to catch up.
Thus, to decode one particular sequence, you’d have to know that Lockwood’s previous novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. To decode several others, you’d have to know that Amazon bought the TV rights to her memoir. The distinction between author and narrator appears to have been abolished (we’re in Autofiction Country) and the novel depends for many of its effects almost entirely on off-page context.
The Patricia Lockwood of the novel has elite problems, elite experiences. She ponders the fact that Kurt Russell, “of all people”, is interested in playing her father on TV. But she and her cowriter can’t get the show to work, and Lockwood doesn’t help matters by writing a zany letter to Kurt Russell. So relatable! She has lunch with “Shakespeare’s Wife” (Anne Hathaway: ho ho) and gets a riffy chapter out of it. Lit-biz people appear in propria persona (she weeps with John Lanchester during an interview – she is always being interviewed) or in coded disguise (“my normal friend” – just two literary celebs hanging out in the Musée D’Orsay).
Halfway through, she quotes an online essay about herself, in which the writer says, “I think she [Lockwood] is a genius, but I do not know what kind.” Lockwood comments: “There are only two kinds, and one of them is: evil. So now I have that to worry about as well.” Note that the idea that Lockwood is a genius has been smuggled into her text and not contradicted. The fans, at least, will agree. The rest of us will either find ourselves charmed into joining the fandom – and Lockwood can be enormously charming on the page – or we will simply head off in search of books addressed to that moribund angel, the General Reader.
