“The Winged Thing”
by Patricia Lockwood
from the November 30, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I don’t believe Patricia Lockwood has published any fiction, but I have certainly heard of her and have read some of her poems that showed up in The New Yorker over the past decade. Her memoir Priestdaddy also made waves a few years ago. She’s intelligent and her perspective on online culture is in demand. Indeed, her interview with David Wallace for The New Yorker is much more about the internet than it is about this story, though this story is about being online so it fits nicely.
In February, Riverhead is publishing her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This. “The Winged Thing” is an excerpt from this forthcoming book.
This story is a series of instances (and it sounds like the book is as well — the interview brings up Renata Adler’s work), and I find them quite lovely. Here is the first:
Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together, as if it were all on the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying.
And, because I like it as well, here is the second:
The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they become untrue only when they entered someone else’s life and butted up, trivial, against its bigness?
These short instances coalesce quickly into a story. The narrator’s sister is having a troubled pregnancy that threatens her life: “Could the person in all those Facebook pictures, the blinking three dots in the text window, could the ringtone that startled her whenever her sister called simply disappear?” The narrator mourns just the potential loss of her sister’s originality. The narrator also wonders about the baby that might not live:
If the baby lived — for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long, they did not know what her life would be — she would live in her senses. Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state. Tide pools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.
This subtle connection between the sister and this unborn and potentially unknowable being that lives “along her edges” is thought provoking.
“The Winged Thing” does not focus solely on this potential — and dreaded — abortion. It is there, but so is the tragedy that seems to be leading to it, so is the narrator’s return home to Ohio, to conservative parents who have to change how they say Obama Care once it steps in to help them understand a little better what is happening to the unborn child. The narrator, driving down the roads, thinks she also might have become addicted to pills had she stuck around. And here she is trying to help her sister who is ill and living through one of the worst things imaginable.
This story, as I’m sure is clear, will not connect with a large part of the American electorate, if the recent election is any indication. “The Winged Thing” is not shy about its criticism, but nor is it solely about that criticism. In other words, it’s reason for being is not to call out the other side. For one thing (spoiler alert) the baby is born and loved. The big-hearted story is about quite a bit. I found its look at this harrowing situation to be empathetic to the pregnant sister as well as to the father, who is learning that the world he fought for is not actually a place he wants to live. I found it complex in the way it presented the narrator who works hard to escape to the internet but who finds that it does not have the answers she is looking for.
As the story gets closer to the end, we get some more instances that are similar to those at the beginning of the story, instances where something transcends the expected:
The great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there.
I wonder if this is the start of the forthcoming book. If so, it is a solid start and suggests an interesting story to come.
Yeah, it’s quite an interesting piece. I’ve had a question about a piece she wrote a few months ago, but never had an answer. In https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/patricia-lockwood/diary when she calls “Regarding Henry” a “terrible movie”, does she mean “crap movie” or does she mean that the events portrayed in the movie are terrifying?
Paul —
I haven’t seen that movie. But I looked it up and found this:
“The film received mixed reviews with the positive regard expressed for the strong cast and nuance of performance and negative regard expressed for the film’s sentimentality and manipulativeness. “
Which suggests to me that Lockwood meant “terrible” in the former sense.
Thanks, William. Sometimes, people outside the literary scene “read too deeply” into literary criticism and assume a deeper meaning when critics adopt a vernacular reader-friendly style. I remember reading a foreword of a novel, discussing Shakespeare’s plays and describing one of them as “terrible”. [I think this was Coriolanus, but I’m not sure]. I showed the foreword to a coworker and both she and I thought that “terrible” meant something like “inspiring terror.” We couldn’t entertain the thought that anyone would be so dismissive about the Great Bard. After a bit more casual research, I found that it’s a very commonly held view that Shakespeare’s worst plays are bad, notwithstanding his obvious greatness.
There is some interesting material here if a little too much much pathos. A spoonful’ll do, but this was like a not-fully-muddled old fashioned served to the reader in a plastic cup that once held a Slurpee instead of a rocks glass. The smart-enough observation here and there comes through for Lockwood (there’s still whiskey and simple syrup and tasteable bitters and a big ol’ ice cube). ie: The mutagenic sludge one’s legitimately good. The mom and the dad feel like they get more page-time in the book from which this piece is excerpted. I wanted (way) more of the neurologist and the geneticist and the art therapist. If they recur in the book, it might not be half bad.
For almost every subject the author essays, there is someone who’s done it considerably better, but hey, that’s true of most things. I wanted it to surprise me, and it usually didn’t, but every now and then it intrigued. Like the “Cat Person” writer (Roupenian) that blew up in The New Yorker and got paid a lot of money and now seems unlikely to become much as a writer, Lockwood also “went viral” (w/ her poem “Rape Joke”), and so her trajectory read as probably a dismissible one, or at best a retread of “alt lit,” but it seems like she’s got some potential and staying power and real talent.
Lockwood is now more than a gimmick (I think). The Elephant Man entry (and these are more “entries” than “literature”) is the best distillation of what this author is getting at here. It’s pretty damn good as a sort of “flash autofiction.”
All that said, it’s hard not to riff on the line “They knew someone at the hospital, and so the tall stack of her sister’s paperwork rose to the top like cream” with “And Lockwood knew someone in the publishing world, and so her submission to the New Yorker rose to the top of some editor’s desk…” (Oops, I mean, the top of “their” inbox, to make it clear–like Lockwood’s insistent, and one might argue defensive, “I’m with it” tone–that I know that these days most things are done on computers, and that I need to virtue-signal my hatred of things like white privilege or a midwestern upbringing and embrace being a capital-F Feminist and a user of non-offensive pronouns).
Reach exceeds grasp but this is not awful. It’s above average, actually. She’s better (at prose) than Ben Lerner, if not as good as Sally Rooney or Lauren Oyler (at least not in this excerpt). Lockwood seems smart and well-read and not afraid to take chances. In her accompanying interview she shows she’s aware of the work of W.G. Sebald and David Markson, and that’s encouraging. Whether she’s aware of how far she has to go and how hard she has to work to get to their insanely high level I cannot know, but there’s a brain here that doesn’t take any guff, and so I’ll probably get on her skyway and take the book-length ride when it comes out in 2021 (or at least borrow someone’s review copy).
This didn’t quite “impress” but it has moments. And given the subject matter, just not driving the car into a ditch is an accomplishment.
Also, Lockwood’s recent essay on Nabokov in the London Review of Books is one I highly recommend.
Sean H. thank you for your reasoned, well written, and defensible piece. Also, very important, entertaining. Things get fun at 3:19 in the morning. john b.
I’m going to pre-order this immediately. I was impressed by her skill. What Sean saw as perhaps her being a bit too ambitious, maybe a bit inchoate, I saw as simply multi-dimensional and casting a wide net. I liked how this seemed to be at first about writing and creativity and then settled into this more philosophical story. Interestingly, despite the clear leftist position here, I didn’t actually see her as exactly a criticism of anti-choicers as Trevor did. Obviously, Lockwood would probably identify as pro-choice, but once the inevitable occurs here, I could also see an anti-choicer taking to this as an example of why NOT to abort or induce. The baby seems in many ways the literal ‘miracle’ often used as a term by anti-choicer to argue for carrying a pregnancy to term.
The baby seems almost like Kubrick’s star child or some mystical creation. I almost felt like the baby was an ontological challenge. I’m really curious about the whole book
BTW: Lockwood clearly dislikes Regarding Henry. That film has a pretty darn low reputation as one of the many embarrassments that mar Mike Nichols late career.
Unrelated, but hey, how often does one get to participate in a Regarding Henry discussion?! That was also one of JJ Abrams’s earliest produced screenplays, when he was in but his mid-20s. I’ve yet to be even remotely impressed by Abrams, and “Spielberg-aping cokehead hack” would not seem to be an inaccurate label for him. I’ve not seen Regarding Henry, but it looks cheesy.
As for Mike Nichols, I don’t think any single bad work of art “mars” one’s career. And I’d say Regarding Henry is more “middle period,” Ken, no? Nichols was in his fifties for that one, and lived into his eighties and has a full 8 of 22 of his director credits after RH. And I actually would argue that much of his late stuff is downright excellent, far from embarrassing. Charlie Wilson’s War, Closer, and Angels in America are among his most satisfying work; I’d rate them all a 3.5 out of 4 stars.
I guess I think of everything after the 1970s as “late” for Nichols, but technically you’re correct AND I would agree that Closer and Angels in America are quite good and it was nice to see him go out on a good note BUT “What Planet Are You From?” If that’s not an embarrassment, nothing is. And there’s a lot of equally dull and mediocre stuff in his “late” career, but ok “mid” technically makes more sense her.