The Booker Long-list: no one is talking about this, by Patricia Lockwood

by Jennifer Bryce

Another of the Booker long-list, this book had me asking myself, what is a novel? These days we are so influenced by social media, we are used to reading snatches of often witty (or trying to be witty) observations. This book, particularly the first part of it, is made up of just that: short clips that you might call stanzas – indeed, Patricia Lockwood is a poet. I don’t use Twitter, and this is most likely why I didn’t ‘get’ the first part of the book. For example I just don’t get the significance, or amusement of ‘Can a dog be twins?’ Yet I can see that Lockwood writes beautifully – poetically: turning ‘like the shine on a school of fish’.

Patricia Lockwood

It has been suggested that this novel continues to answer a question that Lockwood has addressed on Twitter: How do we write now? For some, the Internet is life – we are addled by it, overwhelmed by it. And Part 1 of the novel shows this. Then, near the end of Part 1 the protagonist (who remains nameless throughout) receives a text from her mother, concerning her sister’s pregnancy: ‘Something has gone wrong’. Elsewhere, Lockwood has presented her family as highly dysfunctional (Priestdaddy, 2017). Her father is a gun-toting, all-American, frequently semi-naked priest who underwent a religious conversion after watching The Exorcist seventy times on a Navy submarine. He was converted to Catholicism and was admitted to the priesthood although he was already married and had a family.

For the rest of the book we see how a family nestles around the sister, who gives birth to a little girl with Proteus Syndrome – thought to be the cause of the deformities of 19th century ‘Elephant Man’, made famous through film and play. This baby is warmly loved and cared for during the six months of her life. The story is still conveyed in snatches, but there is a binding narrative. And I ponder whether that might be the best way to tell such a story. We would expect it to be tragic – but was it? ‘She held the little hand and waited for its wilted pink squeeze, like the handshake of a lily.’