I’m convinced Patricia Lockwood is trolling me. “You’ve never heard of him?” I ask. ”Martin Amis?” I tell her she and Amis have a similar sense of humour, in their criticism and their fiction.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lockwood says.

Later, Lockwood admits she misheard me. She thought I was recommending the work of someone named Martin Nemours.

“My publicist and a subsequent interviewer were laughing because Martin came up again later, in a different context, and I was like, OH, MARTIN AMIS,” she says. “Declan must have thought I was an amoeba not to know. But look – now we’ve invented a new man named Martin Nemours. I hear he’s very good.”

For the record, I do not think Patricia Lockwood is an amoeba. I do think, given her fondness for wordplay, that her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, has issues. One of them is that it is singularly brilliant. The other is that, after years of playing with words, Lockwood now finds words playing with her.

Our narrator is an unnamed writer afflicted by a mysterious illness. She struggles to put together sentences, never mind poetry. She turns to hobbies (K-drama binges; jewellery-making: “Would it be like that sad thing where we all had to pretend to care about Sylvia Plath’s drawings of shoes?“). She tells her husband she is experiencing “Permanent Visuals”. He tells her that’s called being alive.

Her one trick is writing. It is a trick she has forgotten how to perform.

Here are some of my notes on the book, 50 pages in: Has everyone been listening to Kid A wrong? Rivers Cuomo: dead? Leonora Carrington & God’s perineum? Cats: the butthole cut?

All questions. Her new novel was heralded by a 2020 London Review of Books piece. Its title (Lockwood is keen to assure me she did not choose it) was: “Insane after coronavirus?”

I tell her, 30 pages into the new novel, that I feared I was going insane. “Fear was your reaction?” Lockwood asks. “I like that. I like that you were scared.”

Only to begin with; by the end I thought It’s bloody good - even better than her last book.

That novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021), was the Booker finalist everyone kept talking about. The germ of No One ... began as a British Library lecture published in the LRB in 2019 as The Communal Mind. Lockwood’s fizzy, irreverent criticism and essays are as much a cause for celebration as her novels; the LRB, you could argue, has become an incubator for her fiction.

Experimenting with the terminally online’s everything-at-once style, No One was by turns lucid and fragmented. Will There ever Be Another You, by contrast, is the sort of novel that speaks its own language and teaches you to become conversational, if not fluent.

Much of it reads like a 3am inner monologue (keyed-up, anxious, bereft). There is no authorial hand-holding, unless you try placing every narrative egg in the deus ex machina basket of Illness! or But she’s going MAD! Some critics have suggested the books’ title should alert readers to its doppelganger motifs. Less has been made of the possibility that it’s simply referring to Lockwood’s anxiety about dividing her readership.

The US author, poet and essayist has a reputation for comedy, but Lockwood is equally good at conveying pain. Her most vigorously misunderstood poem, Rape Joke, does exactly what it says on the box. Humour offers ways of contemplating life’s most difficult experiences. And in Lockwood, as in life, the comedy is often serious.

There must have been courage to write the book the way she has, I posit, given there’s a sense of this existence that’s almost contextless.

“I look upon the writer of this book – who I don’t feel, entirely, is me – with great tenderness,” Lockwood says. “Because I’m like, ‘It’s very valiant that you were trying to do that. You couldn’t make sense, you couldn’t recognise faces, you didn’t know your own brother’s middle name – and you were still trying to write literature!’.

“My whole thing is that everybody gets a Naked Lunch. It’s a trap to want to be considered an authority, to want to preserve your authority, to want to speak from the pulpit and be heard by the people. I far prefer art that is tentative, that is unknowing, that doesn’t understand, that is trying to reach into those areas. I just want to be writing the weird stuff.”

Midway through Will There, after her husband undergoes surgery, the narrator inserts her hand into his post-op wound. It’s Caravaggio by way of Cronenberg (“A husband could just be open like that?“). The narrator marvels at her husband’s ersatz vagina, the peekaboo wound like Bonne de Luxembourg’s prayer-book Christ, prompting her to laugh, “you would fall apart without me”! It’s moving and funny precisely because neither of these effects is separable from the other.

In another chapter, the narrator, recalling an acquaintance, describes “reconstituting her” from memory. Reconstitution is a good description of what drives Lockwood’s weirdness: life reconstituted through social media in No One; a young woman reconstituted by authoritarian parenting, patriarchy and the church in her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy; cartoons reconstituted as ontological Rorschach tests in her debut, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black.

Whether it’s the absurdist juxtapositions of her poetry (Walt Whitman … with tit pics!), Priestdaddy’s sense of ruptured innocence, the whirling associations of Will There or No One’s linguistic contortions (“sneezing” is for normies; “sneazing” is for the clued in), Lockwood’s mish-mash of ephemera and trivia, scatterbrain and galaxy brain, memecore and egregore, reminds us that either everything matters or else nothing does.

Yet for an author whose success grew thanks to Twitter and writing about the internet, Lockwood remains circumspect about the potential of what she dubs “the portal” for creative experimentation. Her fierce originality runs counter to its current incarnation as a mass-market collection of repetitions, cliches and tics.

Little wonder, then, that she has returned to her first love, poetry. Readying a new collection of verse, her first in over a decade, she says she has even begun thinking about making a website. It will, in distinction to the advertiser-starved attention harvesting of our corporate overlords, be free and communal and aggressively and irreproachably normal.

What will it be called? “The Normal Website.” I tell her, with as much normality as I can, that I cannot wait.

After a chapter purporting to “rank” the arts (film > dance > translation > biography), the novel’s epilogue suggests the creative summit belongs to art that communicates “the way it was put together [...] the process of assembly”. (The end of this quote is taken, aptly enough, from Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, a book Lockwood wrote about for the LRB.)

There is a telling moment in Priestdaddy when Lockwood describes protest banners at an anti-abortion rally as a “radicalized” alphabet: “The words in their order marched. This meant that I knew how to read.“

As for the narrator of Will There, the Writerly Presence that has earned her fame is now a liability. After telling a nurse that she feels “I am being pulled out of the world by the hair” (“Do you mean that you are dizzy?” the nurse tries clarifying), she reminds herself, “This isn’t the Best American Essays, bitch!”

”Language is a virus”, William Burroughs wrote. But if Lockwood is ill, I am happy to be infected.

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