Patricia Lockwood's 'No One Is Talking About This' - A Review

I started reading No One is Talking About This by author Patricia Lockwood in the Retiro Park in Madrid on the first really hot day of the year. I had the whole afternoon stretched out before me with nothing to do and a lot of sun to take in. I had picked up this book, published in February of this year, out of a fairly anonymous recommendation made online. As it often goes nowadays, a literary account I follow posted a raving review of the book and in the next 5 minutes I had ordered it from eBay and was disposed to wait the extra delivery time, that my personal boycott to Death-azon supposed, to get my hands on it. What had initially caught my attention from this exalted review was the description of the book’s premise; a protagonist that is ‘very online’ navigating the intricacies and complexities of the digital world. This was enough to rouse my interest, as it brought with it a supposition on my part that that novel would not be adhering to conventional forms, it would be pushing boundaries and revealing truths of the modern world, at its best. This was original enough and paired with the trusted source giving it the go-ahead, I was willing to give it a shot. So there I was, after a short 2-week wait, under the hot late April sun, I opened the book and began to read. Instantly we’re thrust into the protagonist’s world. An exuberant, cosmic and unstable voice that has earned a certain online presence with a viral tweet, “Can a dog be twins” is our guide through this particular underworld. This tweet has propelled her to some fraction of acclaim and she currently lives off of this momentary dazzle, travelling the world, giving conferences about the online world, aptly named the portal in the book. After about thirty pages, I was thoroughly mystified and perhaps a little sun-struck. It was like nothing I'd ever read before and I was questioning the very language in front of me like: did I seriously just read the word binch in a novel? Lockwood's poetic, piercing language was discombobulating and unforgiving in its vivacity and its wild originality.

I thought I was way over my head with this.

I am part of the vast, encompassing, and to a great degree, welcoming online community; I belong to a pocket of the Internet and by its mere properties become acquainted with the common joke, the news and opinions circulating that day at a very high speed. I use the same moving pictures every one else is familiar with; I read the viral thing of the day just like everybody else. It was slowly realizing that that was what Lockwood was representing, this New Language that the era of social media has brought along with it, a language you become fluent in by the virtue of scrolling for enough time, that seated me into the manoeuvring groove of the novel. As Lockwood herself puts it in one of her tweet-esque paragraphs that compose the book and that I deeply identified with:

“A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read…?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.”

I understood she and I shared something – the online language. She was representing the collective consciousness, describing how an outlandish idea becomes canonical in the matter of days, how flat-earthers came to be, the never ending loop of gifs and the standards set by the voiceless ether:

“Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be.” I admit to taking a quick dive into her online presence mid-read, namely interviews and podcasts Lockwood had been in, and frankly, it gave me a soothing confirmation that she appeared to be in fact, as mad as the narrator's voice in the book is. The irony is not lost on me, the unnecessary intimacies the portal offers allowed me to conduct this circumferential search, fill my brain with more fodder material which is now essential to enjoying anything in life, apparently. Very much like the snippet near the end of the book of where the narrator reads the whole of Marlon Brandon's Wikipedia entry,

"Nothing useful, but one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive - wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando." I started to ‘get it’. And I started to need it. I needed it to tell me comforting things about our unified mind, feel connected to this one person I’ve never met or seen through instances of shared humour. The book evolves; it is a two-part novel with a marked difference in tone between the two parts. The first concerns the above described, lifting you up into the clouds of online absurdity with dazzling wit and cracking humour. From there you observe the phenomenon of how,

“Every day, their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”

Or how everyone came to agree that the word binch is simply matter of factedly funnier than the word bitch. Lockwood captures the allure, the addictive nature of it,

"When she put the portal down, the Thread tug her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence."

I loved her description of the necessity the portal etches into the user to be more radical than, to ride the wave it is spelling out and repeat stuff after it.

"Every fibre in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police." The second part slowly ripped my heart out. It revealed, like a handkerchief yanked off of a top hat exposing two frightened rabbits, a tender reckoning with the magnanimous forces of life, which force you to put your feet back on earth, close the portal and walk around, look and take care of someone. The change, is from being someone who “wanted to delight and be delighted” to becoming a "citizen of necessity". Prolonged grief has no place on the portal. The immediate serotonin rush that a rat experiences tapping for more cocaine, or for the memory of cocaine or the feeling of cocaine, is dispelled from the mind and the answer you've been looking for so long in the portal, the void, the Thread that will connect everything, is right there before you and you wonder how you could have ever been so consumed by delighting and being delighted. It is music and eyes and rainbows. It is fixation and obsession. For a 200 page book, No One is Talking About This scrunches up its fists and punches you in the face with a tirade of brilliant revelations, pockets of wisdom and glimpses into humanity at its most contradictory. What an explosive book to carry around. I hope it detonates in more and more pockets in the unravelling future.

Patricia Lockwood

No One is Talking About This is shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The winner is announced on the 7th of July. Other shortlisted titles are Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennet, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones, Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.