IF YOU have been scavenging for a jewel of the post-internet age, then you’ve found it. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is a disorientating bumper ride through the thing that many of us love and loathe in tandem: the internet-mediated present moment.
Indiana-born Lockwood is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), and two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012). No One Is Talking About This is her debut novel, available to buy in (virtual) bookstores next week.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Initially waylaid by the cacophony Lockwood produces, which doesn’t subside for the entirety of the text, No One Is Talking About This is dizzying from the first paragraph. The plot centres (or explodes, perhaps) around a woman, her relatives and her proximity to “the portal”, or what we might call the internet. The novel is a reverberating chamber of tweet discourse, memes and references to a hyperaware culture that slips from grasp even as it fills innumerable feeds.
Some way in, I was surprised to notice that the novel’s tender core isn’t totally eclipsed by the portal. I was touched by its depth of compassion, the sweetness invoked in human (and, at one point, human-canine) relations – even if they are gently interrupted by references to Harambe and Jason Momoa. In fact, it might be Lockwood’s ability to glide effortlessly into those portions of the Twitter prism – strangely refracting a million familiar realities – that tempers the sentiment of love and grief.
It’s her acute vision of life, in all its scattered pixels, that allows for a certain profundity to emerge from the seemingly trivial rubble we generate as a species. And, weirdly, that feels rawer than a world in which the internet doesn’t exist, because it’s actually very easy to imagine yourself scrolling through chihuahua gifs with a tear-blurred gaze.
Patricia Lockwood
The most affecting character is a newborn baby, whose gentleness offers a contrast to the marks of cruelty (a dictator is in power) and self-sabotaging irony that the world churns out in accelerated gestures. Thinking back on a stranger that took an unsolicited photograph of the baby, the protagonist feels gratitude rather than anger – that her niece’s aliveness, in a moment of joy, might somehow be captured and disseminated, immortalised by the portal’s machinery.
In terms of its structure, No One Is Talking About This is composed of a series of paragraphs, punctuated by three small squares between each one. This enables Lockwood to barge in on her own plot with deeply funny quips, delicious instances of repartee between the protagonist and her husband, as well as general observations about the troubling system the characters inhabit – one that looks increasingly like our own.
Lockwood changes font to indicate text messages between the protagonist and her sister, employs the clapping emoji and capitalises sentences in a move which suggests, as Hadley Freeman pointed out in a recent interview with Lockwood, a kind of “meta sarcasm” that the latter uses in her own communications. The line where Lockwood ends and the novel begins, then, is somewhat blurred, and this effect begins to trickle through to the reader.
Wading through these synchronicities between the novel and my blinking phone, it sparks the kind of laughter that tumbles out when you feel known, when someone says something that accurately reflects back to you every millisecond of your existence.
The idea of its resolute obscurity to someone reading it 200 years from now only amplifies this cackle. When the laughter abates, however, No One Is Talking About This says something else. It says yes, you are familiar, but only to this temporary glitch of a moment in the long stretch of time. So what will you do with that moment? Whom will you hold close?
by Alice Hill-Woods
No One Is Talking About This is published by Bloomsbury, and will be available to purchase from February 16, 2021.