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A review by lesserjoke
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
2.0
In the parlance of this novel: "I'm in this photo and I don't like it."
Which is to say, a lot of the story is an attempt to portray what it's like to be Extremely Online, tapped into that stream of global consciousness that delivers up milkshake ducks and memes and post-ironic viral tweets in an ever-accelerating cycle, a brilliant but toxic but mostly just weird digital ecosystem that's hard to fully grasp from the outside. Author Patricia Lockwood captures that essence perhaps better than any novelist I've seen, and I can definitely relate to her protagonist's difficulty explaining what's made her laugh to a spouse who's less plugged-in.
At the same time, the writer is much harsher towards that uniquely modern mode of technologically-enhanced existence than I think is entirely fair, although her critiques are largely by implication rather than expressed outright. And that's the biggest problem with this project: it is incredibly disjointed and aimless, achieving the occasional sharp insight but couching everything in needlessly florid language. Donald Trump is called only "the dictator." The internet itself is "the portal." And for more than half the book, there's no plot to speak of whatsoever.
Then a little past the midway point, our heroine gets news of complications in her sister's pregnancy, which helps ground the narrative in emotional stakes and a structure that has been completely absent before. (It's also based somewhat on Lockwood's own family history, I gather.) I greatly prefer that part of the work, despite the clumsily offensive ignorance-is-bliss metaphor linking the baby born with minimal brain function to people who can manage to keep themselves off social media.
The text as a whole, though, isn't great. The bifurcation between its separate halves is too acute, and the larger early section is a fever dream of nonsense even for those of us who can generally follow along. I've picked up on many references to real events, but I couldn't rightly classify the rest as either items I happened to miss over the past few years or pure invented hyperbole standing in for them satirically. It channels the experience of virtual life in the Trump era, floundering in a tide of rising extremism egged on by the bully-in-chief and rapid-fire swings in the zeitgeist of acceptable discourse, yet it does so in a way that's already off-putting now and seems guaranteed to age poorly from there. I can barely imagine anyone loving this title upon publication in 2021, let alone once time has robbed future readers of any easy context.
[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter
Which is to say, a lot of the story is an attempt to portray what it's like to be Extremely Online, tapped into that stream of global consciousness that delivers up milkshake ducks and memes and post-ironic viral tweets in an ever-accelerating cycle, a brilliant but toxic but mostly just weird digital ecosystem that's hard to fully grasp from the outside. Author Patricia Lockwood captures that essence perhaps better than any novelist I've seen, and I can definitely relate to her protagonist's difficulty explaining what's made her laugh to a spouse who's less plugged-in.
At the same time, the writer is much harsher towards that uniquely modern mode of technologically-enhanced existence than I think is entirely fair, although her critiques are largely by implication rather than expressed outright. And that's the biggest problem with this project: it is incredibly disjointed and aimless, achieving the occasional sharp insight but couching everything in needlessly florid language. Donald Trump is called only "the dictator." The internet itself is "the portal." And for more than half the book, there's no plot to speak of whatsoever.
Then a little past the midway point, our heroine gets news of complications in her sister's pregnancy, which helps ground the narrative in emotional stakes and a structure that has been completely absent before. (It's also based somewhat on Lockwood's own family history, I gather.) I greatly prefer that part of the work, despite the clumsily offensive ignorance-is-bliss metaphor linking the baby born with minimal brain function to people who can manage to keep themselves off social media.
The text as a whole, though, isn't great. The bifurcation between its separate halves is too acute, and the larger early section is a fever dream of nonsense even for those of us who can generally follow along. I've picked up on many references to real events, but I couldn't rightly classify the rest as either items I happened to miss over the past few years or pure invented hyperbole standing in for them satirically. It channels the experience of virtual life in the Trump era, floundering in a tide of rising extremism egged on by the bully-in-chief and rapid-fire swings in the zeitgeist of acceptable discourse, yet it does so in a way that's already off-putting now and seems guaranteed to age poorly from there. I can barely imagine anyone loving this title upon publication in 2021, let alone once time has robbed future readers of any easy context.
[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter