Review: Patricia Lockwood’s Book Is a Pleasant Fever Dream

One solution for representing the internet-augmented discontinuity of contemporary life is the fragment novel. Seas of white space separate paragraphs, which together compose archipelago chapters; themes and subjects wash from one island to another; and voice is like climate, general across the complex. The fractured self, which is taken to be a microcosm of the fractured world, achieves coherence this way. Disparate phenomena become a whole system. But this form, popular in the pre-COVID days and lampooned in Lauren Oyler’s 2021 novel Fake Accounts and in a Joyce Carol Oates tweet from the same year that called its representatives “wan little husks,” can seem quaint in the wake of the virus’s massive disruptions and death toll — particularly if one’s setting is the pandemic era itself