Patricia Lockwood's Brilliant "Isn't that ... female?"

Patricia Lockwood (Photo by Thomas Slack)

The best book review of the year (so far) is Patricia Lockwood’s “Isn’t that ... female?” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2024). It’s an appraisal of A. S. Byatt’s recently reissued Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories. Actually, it’s an appraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre. Lockwood loves Byatt. She writes,

I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too. 

What I savor are Lockwood’s ingenious descriptions – surreal montages of incredibly vivid, concentrated imagery inspired by Byatt’s works. For example:

The cover of the original edition of Medusa’s Ankles – hell, the title, let’s be honest – illustrates the aesthetic problem. An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

And:

My affinity is perhaps unexpected. I know the books so well that looking at them on the shelf is like reading them. What she created for me, in the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet Raphael Faber, ever withdrawing his tapered fingertips, dry as his own spice cakes. Out on the moors is Jacqueline, with thick sandwiches, observing her population of Cepea nemoralis. Carrying dishes to the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from “an excess of exact imagination,” exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.

And this extraordinary summary of Margaret Drabble:

The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer Bird-Cage, devouring, immoral, greedy as golden syrup, drunk on the morning of her wedding, in a wild silk dress and a dirty bra, telling her sister she would love her forever if she made her some Nescafé.

No other critic writes like this. James Wood creates wonderful collages of exquisite quotation. This one, for example, from his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005), a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

But this is different from Lockwood’s fever dreams of condensed imagery. Here’s one more from her Byatt piece:

Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number of glazes. But colour was one of Byatt’s strongest points, such that you can feel different schemes in every book. The greens of Possession – vegetable, mineral and moss when we are in Brittany – and the burnishing panther of the fairy tales, gold-purple-black, stalking through. The buttery sunlight and gouache of Still Life. Reading her at seventeen I had an idea that perhaps the English had a better sense of colour because they spent so much time looking at teacups; I must be highly disadvantaged in this regard. Coffee cups have Garfield on them – or, if you’re unlucky, Odie. They do not fill your mind with the soft dreaming tints that made up Byatt’s encyclopedia. She has to mention it every time; it is more than an attribute, it is an achievement, a soul. The eggs of things are being lifted up out of their Easter dye, and don’t you exclaim every time? What a surprise! Look at that one!

Those last three sentences are inspired. The whole piece is inspired – criticism as passionate creation.