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A review by rae_swabey
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
5.0
I devoured most of this book in a day. It hooked me like a newsfeed and seemed to replicate the same processes in my brain, even as it satirised them.
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
It is a book of two halves, the first being a prose-poetry tumble of images, memes, snippets of news stories, in-jokes and interjections of real life that speaks incredibly eloquently about how it feels to live a life dominated by social media. As someone who’s fallen in and out of love with Twitter more than once, insightful, hilarious, and frightening, because yes, that is how my brain feels after a far-longer-than-I-intended scroll.
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
In the second half of the book, real life bursts in and the way the narrator had been making sense of the world - through a hive mind of shared language, references and tone-policed detachment - no longer cuts it. Gradually, the tone shifts, until we end up in a place where real emotional depths are expressable.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
This novel does more to articulate what it means to live in this strange liminal half-online space, its appeal, its culture, its limitations, than anything else I’ve read. The tone and structure - staccato passages, mixed metaphors, deadpan punchlines - perfectly convey the sense-from-chaos/chaos-from-sense feeling of an absent-minded scroll.
When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.
The references are so achingly of-the-moment at the time of writing that they’re already dated - it’s a startlingly accurate snapshot. It talks about this phenomenon, so familiar to us now that it’s like wallpaper yet still culturally relatively unexamined, and it does so in its own language, with wit, affection and bubbling unease.
A groundbreaking book.
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
It is a book of two halves, the first being a prose-poetry tumble of images, memes, snippets of news stories, in-jokes and interjections of real life that speaks incredibly eloquently about how it feels to live a life dominated by social media. As someone who’s fallen in and out of love with Twitter more than once, insightful, hilarious, and frightening, because yes, that is how my brain feels after a far-longer-than-I-intended scroll.
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
In the second half of the book, real life bursts in and the way the narrator had been making sense of the world - through a hive mind of shared language, references and tone-policed detachment - no longer cuts it. Gradually, the tone shifts, until we end up in a place where real emotional depths are expressable.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
This novel does more to articulate what it means to live in this strange liminal half-online space, its appeal, its culture, its limitations, than anything else I’ve read. The tone and structure - staccato passages, mixed metaphors, deadpan punchlines - perfectly convey the sense-from-chaos/chaos-from-sense feeling of an absent-minded scroll.
When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.
The references are so achingly of-the-moment at the time of writing that they’re already dated - it’s a startlingly accurate snapshot. It talks about this phenomenon, so familiar to us now that it’s like wallpaper yet still culturally relatively unexamined, and it does so in its own language, with wit, affection and bubbling unease.
A groundbreaking book.