Patricia Lockwood’s second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You takes readers across the threshold of a mushroom circle. Whether you believe in fairies or not is irrelevant. The altered reality you find yourself in will ripple out and reconfigure your perceptions all the same.
Will There Ever Be Another You takes off from where Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This, ends—and takes off is meant quite literally, for the book begins with a trip across the Atlantic Ocean from the U.S. to Scotland. While the narrator is exploring the Fairy Pools (a real group of small waterfalls on the Isle of Skye), two important events occur: The narrator’s sister misplaces her phone, and the narrator drinks water from a fairy pool. Luckily, they manage to retrieve her sister’s phone and, more importantly, the pictures it holds of her sister’s recently departed and forever mourned child. Unluckily, for the narrator, her husband’s water filtration device fails her, and she becomes violently sick. The disorientation of this illness proves to be just a prelude to what COVID-19 and long COVID bring the narrator upon her return to the U.S., where she crashes through the looking glass and emerges in a world and a body made unfamiliar by pandemic. From doctor’s appointments to shroom-fueled diary entries, the narrator attempts to find her footing and reforge her perspective as a writer and a person.
As always in the Booker finalist’s work, absurd humor is interpolated into dreamy sensory prose. The difference between Will There Ever Be Another You and No One Is Talking About This or Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy, however, lies in this narrator’s inability to differentiate the unreal from the real: Where Lockwood’s kaleidoscopic poeticism previously felt authoritative, here it feels feverish and off-kilter. The exploration of illness and madness is dendritic and sourceless. There is no thread in the labyrinth to follow, there’s just the labyrinth. This could make the book less satisfying for readers who aren’t familiar with Lockwood’s style and interested in drawing connections to her earlier books.
Harrowing and humorous, Will There Ever Be Another You is a changeling left for readers at the foot of a grassy knoll.