No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
FICTION
No One is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury,$29.99
Aged 19,Patricia Lockwood met her husband in an online poetry chatroom. More than a decade later,she raised $10,000 from her devout Twitter army to pay for his eye surgery. Priestdaddy,her virtuosic comic memoir of growing up as the daughter of a gun-loving,guitar-worshipping Catholic priest,chronicled both milestones.
The internet and what it is to be human are the twin subjects of Lockwood’s autofictional debut novel,No One is Talking About This,shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The unnamed protagonist is,like her,a celebrated citizen of “the portal”. The protagonist’s fame,though,is based on a single absurdist tweet that epitomises “the new humour”:Can a dog be twins?
The novel unfolds in fragments,its form mirroring the endless scroll of the portal. Superficially,it also resembles Jenny Offill’sWeather. Both fragmentary novels curate shining observed details (“sapphires of the instant”) that reflect wider truths about living through our time. But Lockwood’s is filtered through a “not neurotypical” perspective and her “very online” Millennial voice is very different from Offill’s – or,indeed,anyone’s.
Lockwood translates the feeling of being inside the internet into something you can see:“the world pressing closer and closer,the spider web of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk”. She similarly takes us under the skin of her protagonist’s addiction to it:“this problem,this metastasis of the word next,the word more”.
There is a deep pleasure in barrelling through the first half of this playfully reflective novel,as it riffs off the specifics of online culture – from the banal (celebrity dogs,witty fascist haircuts) to the significant (“the dictator”,“trying to hate the police”). Lockwood revels in highlighting the myriad inherent contradictions that internet citizens rarely pause to recognise. (“Capitalism! It was important to hate it,even though it was how you got money.“)
Humming below the surface are deeper philosophical rhythms. In one example after another,Lockwood shows that while the specifics of our lives – language,communication,cultural icons – are unrecognisably different from past generations,essential human dynamics remain remarkably consistent. That said,the protagonist’s life is so shaped by the portal that her life there feels more real than the physical world. Even when she’s away from it,her language and world view are shaped by its culture,just as her father is shaped by right-wing cable news.
This balance is dramatically reversed when her sister’s unborn baby is diagnosed with a rare syndrome,and this real-world scenario now defines everything as intensely as internet culture had before it. “If she lived,they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long … she would live in her senses.”
At first the family focuses on what the diagnosis prevents the baby from being,but this rapidly dissolves into devotion to what she is,taking delight in “the open cloud of her”:her responses to music,to touching a dog,to following “the news” of her world – the voices of the people she knows. “She only knows what it is to be herself,they kept repeating to each other. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and body ought to be able to do.”