Book reviews: ‘We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution’ and ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’

‘We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution’ by Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore’s latest best seller “lands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water,” said Hamilton Cain in the Los Angeles Times. The lauded historian, prominent legal scholar, and New Yorker journalist has constructed a lively chronicle of the many attempts since 1791 to amend the U.S. Constitution, underscoring as she does so that America’s founding document was intended to welcome, not stifle, well-considered revisions and refinements. The pages of the original Constitution sit under glass in Washington, D.C. But Lepore argues that the document should not be seen as akin to Moses’ stone tablets, calling it “an explosion of ideas”—ideas that should both endure and evolve. Eventually, she attacks conservative thinkers of the past half century for spreading the notion that the Constitution is untouchable, thereby rendering America’s divisions more intractable. Still, Lepore’s 15th book is powered by vivid storytelling. It may be “her best yet.”

Instead of focusing exclusively on the framers, Lepore tells the Constitution’s story “through the stories of a much wider variety of Americans,” said Brooke Masters in the Financial Times. Only 27 amendments have been passed among the more than 20,000 that have been formally proposed across nearly 240 years, and Lepore trots forth many advocates whose causes were defeated, either temporarily or permanently. “Abolitionists, prohibitionists, and advocates of Southern states’ rights all have their moment in the spotlight,” as does the last queen of Hawaii and 1950s segregationist David Mays. Lepore doesn’t mind that some bad ideas were barred from infiltrating the Constitution, but she considers it a tragedy that the framers made the obstacles to amendment stiffer than intended, forcing Americans on both the Left and Right to routinely turn to the courts for remedies. One result: the Dred Scott ruling that helped trigger the Civil War.

Lepore shouldn’t blame conservatives for the death of the amendment process, said Christian Schneider in National Review. Yes, former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia popularized the commonsense idea that judges must be guided by the original intended meaning of the Constitution’s language. But Lepore provides “zero evidence” that originalism explains the dearth of amendments since the voting age was lowered in 1971. In fact, “it is more likely the very people advocating for a ‘living Constitution’ who have rendered the amendment process obsolete,” relying as they do on judges to invent new rights. Lepore also refrains from recommending a better way forward, said The Economist. Though that’s disappointing, “We the People is not a road map for repair.” It’s instead “an arresting chronicle of Americans striving—if sometimes failing—to remake their republic.”

‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ by Patricia Lockwood

“Few endeavors could be more paradoxical than writing a book about being unable to write,” said Laura Miller in Slate. But that’s what Patricia Lockwood has attempted in her latest, a work of autofiction that chronicles a dizzying chapter of her life. Beginning in late 2020, the popular and acclaimed poet, memoirist, and novelist suffered a bout with long Covid that plunged her into a brain fog and robbed her of her facility with words. The author of Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This seeks to capture that disorientation in Will There Ever Be Another You, “and sometimes she does pull it off.” She’s also “never not funny.” But the results, especially the early chapters, “can be pretty heavy sledding.”

“Turning over the last page, I asked with pleasure, ‘What was that?’” said Paul McAdory in NYMag.com. The book’s Lockwood-like protagonist is sometimes referred to as “I,” and sometimes as “she,” and most of the chapters “defy easy summary.” Family crises collide with internet flotsam, time frames shift wildly, and Lockwood’s stand-in sometimes sees things that aren’t there. In one chapter, Lockwood’s husband nearly dies from a freak gut condition, and the journey proves “less consummately pleasurable, page by page, than No One.” Still, it’s “studded with passages of extreme beauty” and “exerts a maddening power.” Ultimately, “it is a kind of poetic mind virus, infecting the reader with its strange rhythms, its alien logics, its addled relation to time, and its ideas about the ever-evolving, ever-dissolving self.”

Though Lockwood has remarked that she wrote the book while insane and edited it while sane, “the insanity has not been edited out,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The novel is “often best read as poetry,” even as Lockwood writes of becoming interested in crystals, ingesting mushrooms that inspire a mad immersion in Anna Karenina, and managing the trappings of her growing literary fame, including being asked by Pamela Anderson to ghostwrite the actress’s memoir. The book “feels like a notebook dump and a fever dream,” and “I suspect it will divide her many readers.” Even so, “I can’t help remaining committed to following Lockwood where she leads.”