High on her own supply?

Patricia Lockwood's new novel doubles down and tests the patience of her devotees.

- BY CARL SHUKER

It's what you always want to hear: the most exciting writer-critic writing right now has set herself an impossible task. She is going to write a novel about losing her mind to the coronavirus and evoke it in language, what it feels and sounds like to live in a world where “solid objects seem to rain”.

Patricia Lockwood, at 43, is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and she has written there - authoritatively, brilliantly, personally and at length - on writers and subjects as diverse as Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, mysticism and the Pope. She delivered perhaps the best thing I've read on David Foster Wallace as we enter the middle period of his reexamination. As critic, she’s merciless, loving, sparkling and never falls for the conventional consensus while remaining utterly attuned to what it is.

As a writer, she’s published two books of poetry since her breakout poem - the devastating, hilarious and zeitgeist-defining “Rape Joke” - in 2013. There are three book-length works of prose, the first a memoir, and a breakout hit, Priestdaddy, in 2017. Then, in 2021, her brilliant “novel” No One Is Talking About This took her incredible facility with Twitter and made it, and the internet more generally, both its form and subject.

No One Is Talking About This is amazing and recognised as so: shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Women's Prize and winning the Dylan Thomas Prize. Two-thirds of that wonderful book (which will probably live in the culture like Coupland's Generation X or