Patricia Lockwood

A typical Edna O’Brien story begins on a square of green. A stone farmhouse looms behind, with a slick spot on the flagstones where the same tin can is emptied every morning by the hired man. Pigs are somewhere in the mix, as are sheep and cows. Around and above and within the green floats another colour, that of deep velvet, the sacred heart, a dog’s tongue. This is the austere plush of the Catholic Church, which is everywhere. A road skips like a ribbon past the front door, punctuated by one of the few unbeautiful things in the landscape: men who lie in wait to do pooly in you. Your father is drunk, or trying not to be, and your mother is ‘the sideboard with everything in it’. If you are not in Ireland, you’ve gone somewhere to get away from Ireland. So. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, when her latest novel arrived in the mail, ‘this book is about Boko Haram???’

When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong.

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted. Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP NOW! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’

Lucia Berlin’s style is something I have puzzled over. Sometimes it reads like a really good voiceover in a road movie, from an era when they let auteurs do anything and the desert is photographed like a woman’s thigh and Harry Dean Stanton plays the grandpa. Other times it sounds translated, by someone shyer and more serious than Berlin. Sometimes it is monosyllabic – a tendency towards shorthand that seems both from the future and from the 1950s. There is a hinky flow that is almost never disrupted; her semicolons read like commas; it is the rhythm of a city, which encompasses everything from industrial belches down to twig-footed birds. There are writers who know the bus schedule and those who don’t. She aimed for clarity, directness, but clarity from strange people still sounds strange.

The pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing. Here is the exhilaration of someone fully claiming an exploitative gift – which the writer’s gift so often is, though we do not like to admit this, we wish now to write and still be considered good people. Ha! In memoir you cannot claim such a gift completely and still remain in society, for there is far too much at stake. But conversations on aeroplanes? People you’ll never see again? Interviewers? Men? Go off, Rachel. A strong wind runs through you as you read.

The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot. How much can we really rely on someone who loved The Doors?

In The Square Root of Wonderful, her stand-in Phillip cries out: ‘Don’t understand my writing. Understand me.’ The writing is what we have, though, and the real genius of it is something that would see through the sordidness of her adult life in an instant. It is something intact and childlike that watches from an unmoving corner in the still Southern air. It is deforming to be a prodigy, but for someone like McCullers, it is perhaps more deforming to stop being one. Her work turns on the moment when the prodigy must leave the inner room and go out into the world.

Piece human, piece hornet, the fury of both, astonishing abs all over it. Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits, his head in the hornet and his head in the hum, and oh he want to sting her. The air he breathes is filled with flying cheerleader parts. Splits flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit, the calm eye of the panty in the centre of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS – how? –...