Patricia Lockwood: Eff'ing the Ineffable
A lovely discovery in the London Rev of Books
Gushing Praise inspired by her review of The Shape Am I
A couple or three months ago I subscribed to the London Review of Books because from time to time they have allowed online access to stories I thought was very good. So when a trial offer came to do a $10 for 6 mos subscription, I sent them a check. I like it … not enough to pay regular subscription price for it, but enough to subcribe to it at reduced subscription rates when they come along, much as I do the NY Review of Book, which is one of my top 3 essential reads.
Anyway, my most delightful discovery is this woman, Patricia Lockwood, who has had at least 2 pieces in the LRB since I subscribed. What a voice! One of those polyglots (to use a word highlighted on one of my recent posts) who seems to have read and have the ability to comment on every eggheadish bookwormy historical and theological tract since Pythagoras was inventing angles. And beyond that, she makes me laugh out loud with her surprising turns of phrase and wry observations and wicked full-body blows to puffed up writers … or to the shades of stupidity that characterize conventional 'wisdom.'
I thoroughly enjoyed the last piece I read before this one. But the one in the issue that arrived in our mailbox yesterday cements my admiration for her because, first, of the way she deep fries Critchley, the author of the book she's supposedly reviewing. That part is truly funny. But then she slides smoothly into a post-modern pastiche of thoughts that would baffle and repel literalists, but which finishes by making an astonishing and somehow profound profession of faith in the value and significance of mystical experiences and the people who write about them.
I am definitely going to reread this one … both for the chuckle, and for the hope that I'll be able to eff the ineffable, as she puts it in one of her delicious turns of phrase, and articulate the meaning that I'm quite sure is there.
Also, looking up Lockwood, I am very surprised at the way she looks and by her body of work. She's not at all the woman I had imagined. I feel a visit to Thriftbooks coming on. I also feel … no, I know … that I should already be familiar with this woman. She's very famous, with not only more than 20 of these novel takes on book reviews in the LRB, but highly complimentary reviews of her own work in the New Yorker and other mags. I am almost certainly going to buy the new novel she has coming out in August of this year, “Will There Ever Be Another You.”
I can't remember ever being this enamored by a writer. Love at first read.