Patricia Lockwood: No One Is Talking About This (Hardcover, 2021, Riverhead Books)
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans.
She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts.
When existential threats — from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness — begin to …
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans.
She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts.
When existential threats — from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness — begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything.
“Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.
Hardcover, 224 pages
English language
Published Feb. 15, 2021 by Riverhead Books.
Shout out to the house down the street that put a Santa hat, fairy lights, and LED eyes on their Home Depot skeleton, so that when I walked through the snow down the street listening to the final pages, tears streaming down my face because the loss in the context of hyperconnectedness they depict feels so real, is so resonant with loss I've left, I could wave at a viral eight foot skeleton guy and I know I wasn't quite alone.
I'm very curious how someone who isn't extremely online would read this novel, but for me it was probably the most honest articulation of the experience of living with online? But also living with the weirdness and grief and absurdity and poetry of These Times, more generally. I want more books like this.
