Review of No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Kavan P. Stafford

CW: Mentions of Proteus Syndrome in infants and infant death

 ‘Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words STOP! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’ (p. 3).

   No One is Talking About This (2021) by Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy (2017), has just been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK, and deservedly so. In a literary scene full of young writers trying desperately to depict online life in a way that feels authentic, Lockwood is the only one to have managed. While most writers’ attempts at describing the digital experience opt for the use of emails or texts, effectively becoming semi-epistolary novels, it is Lockwood’s willingness to fully embrace the surreal mundanity of online life that makes this novel so successful. Readers will recognise themselves in her depictions of her unnamed protagonist blankly scrolling through Twitter and other social media platforms, whether they like it or not.

   The book is in two clearly defined parts. For almost the entirety of the first, we are in the protagonist’s head as she navigates the world of the internet and social media. She has achieved a strange and transient online notoriety for a viral tweet which asked ‘can a dog be twins?’ (p. 13) and has segued this into an international tour of conferences and symposiums where she joins other internet stars such as a man who posts pictures of himself with his testicles subtly on show to discuss the phenomenon of social media.

   The protagonist wonders at this type of humour and imagines unsuccessfully trying to explain to her future children why this man showing his testicle was funny or why, for example, in the winter ‘everyone gathered together to watch the incest commercial’ (p.73), a real and inadvertently sexual commercial to advertise Folgers coffee. This simultaneous amusement and confusion beautifully describes the online experience. Who knows why anything is funny any more? It just is.

   While the first half of the book keeps the reader almost relentlessly in the world of the internet, called ‘the portal’ by the protagonist, in the second half the real world rudely intrudes on the narrative as the protagonist’s niece is born with Proteus Syndrome and given only a few months to live. The rest of the novel deals with protagonist’s growing love for this little girl with so little time left and the earnestness of her affection contrasts powerfully with the detached irony of the online life described in the first half of the book.

   This contrast is less clearly defined in the form of the novel. The book is written in a series of short paragraphs which are almost, but not quite, short enough to be considered Tweets in themselves. The effect is one less of reading and more of scrolling through social media take after social media take. This works well in the first half of the novel but less so in the second, when the truncated sentences and paragraphs slightly undermine the seriousness of the subject matter.

   Another slight issue arises in Lockwood’s description of internet phenomena both real – ‘in remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8.45-9.15am’ (p. 24) – and imagined – ‘chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know what’ (p. 5) – which can sometimes fall slightly flat. However even this is an accurate depiction of the internet experience; ‘you had to be there’ we mutter as our parents stare at us blankly having listened to our explanation of a funny Tweet.

   The danger is, as with all books set in a technologically specific time and place, that Lockwood’s book will date rapidly. It’s hard to imagine someone reading it in, say, ten years without cringing slightly and the references to Donald Trump, referred to only as ‘the dictator’ already ring slightly hollow given that he was democratically removed from office only a couple of months before the publication of the novel. That a book will become dated in the future may seem an unfair criticism to level at it now, and perhaps it is, but it seems worth mentioning if only to explain why I think that, despite its quality, it falls short of being a future classic.

   When the protagonist’s niece finally does die in hospital, ‘it was like nothing any of them had ever seen. There was nothing trivial in the room’ (p. 187). The endless trivia of online life has melted away and the protagonist is left with only her very human feeling of loss and grief. The protagonist finds that she still can feel just as powerfully as before and the internet has not entirely ‘broken her brain’ as people like to say on Twitter. The novel, therefore, has a hopeful ending. We may feel that we are increasingly tied to our electronic devices almost to the point of becoming cyborgs but we remain human underneath.

   No One is Talking About This is a beautifully written book which, after an amusing first half, will surprise tears from the eyes of the reader in the second, our journey mirroring that of the protagonist. It would be a worthy winner of this year’s Women’s Prize.

 (Riverhead Books, $17.65/£14.99)