Patricia Lockwood’s new novel’s plot is split by news that the unnamed protagonist receives just over halfway through the book: her sister’s pregnancy is abnormal. This crisis “cleanly and completely [. . .] lift[s] her out of the stream of regular life,” specifically a life of being Extremely Online. Out of the clash between crisis and apparently banal digitized life, Lockwood draws out emotion in all its superficiality, power, and contradiction.
No One Is Talking About This has two subjects, and they seem calculated to throw each other into relief. In drawing together the late 2010s internet and a child with a debilitating disorder, Lockwood sets up an antithesis that initially looks overdetermined. Over the first half of the book, the contents of various digital feeds make their way through the third-person protagonist’s consciousness, as she browses and posts on and even gives talks about the internet. The second half begins with the frightening ultrasound results, and chronicles her sister’s tense pregnancy and delivery and the child’s six-month life. So, thanks in part to all our received ideas about the internet’s lack of real connection, it might seem that the noisy online world is a mere foil for a subsequent, intense experience: a pit of fear in one’s stomach, helpless fury at Ohio legislators, equally helpless love, loss that one can see coming months in advance.
But No One Is Talking About This derives much of its strength and strangeness from that juxtaposition, because what seems like a stark contrast turns out to be porous at almost every point of contact. The novel holds together a singular event that literally changes one’s life, and the flotsam that constitutes so much of one’s lived experience.
Writing about being online is itself a knot of inconsistencies: panics and laments about onlineness have become such clichés that even the rejoinders are clichés. In conveying our intermittently obsessive, generative, and squeamish relation to the internet, Lockwood doesn’t call it “the internet,” doesn’t refer to “social media.” Instead, she writes about “the portal,” which seems to stand for both. The term sounds self-consciously sci-fi, but also suggests something devised by a suboptimal IT department. It is otherworldly and mundane at once. Lockwood also avoids actual labels for most of the myriad viral phenomena she mentions. For example, an allusion to a David Brooks op-ed leaves Brooks out, or she trusts the reader will remember an out-of-touch piece “about going to a deli with a poor friend who was intimidated by the fancy ham.” This mixture (the particular kept particular but submerged under abstraction) documents the contemporaneity and glut of the internet, without sounding judgmental or overly affirmative.
The book’s rhythms prevent its cultural critique from feeling heavy-handed: No One Is Talking About This is composed of untitled, unnumbered chapters, which are in turn composed of short paragraph- or even sentence-length sections, each centered on a single incident or thought. Many passages are thus surrounded by their equal in white space. Lockwood thereby evokes both the kind of attention proper to social media and the venerable mode of stream of consciousness, as if to acknowledge that our ways of thinking have of course been shaped by screens, but not so straightforwardly or radically as we might sometimes feel.
In considering Lockwood’s rendering of that shaping, it’s useful to think again of the clichés of the internet suffusing daily life, which is to say of the partial truths: a toddler trying to double-click on a hardback book, or your own Pavlovian start when a phone buzzes. Though Lockwood takes in similar images, they tend to be more complicated and conflictual: her flexible, precise style suggests both the internet’s omnipresence and limits. Consider how she depicts the way being online changes one’s mental furniture:
After you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didn’t, you would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met.
This sentence tucks a debate about showering hygiene (if you chose May 2019 for a social media break, you missed it) into a description of poster’s syndrome, a description of how the internet exacerbates a persistent human tendency to imagine interlocutors when thinking. And yet while the protagonist is wondering about what the internet is doing to her mind, Lockwood describes the “fine needles of water” hitting her character’s legs, a physical sensation that reiterates a body rather than a disembodied self that looks at a screen. The precision here stems from admitting contradictoriness: though the internet has infiltrated even our showers, showers remain nearly the same as ever.
Lockwood is well positioned to write about being online, because a significant portion of her own life has been tied to it, quite visibly. The internet was likely a lifeline for her younger self, who couldn’t afford college: instead, she exchanged poems in online forums. In the 2010s, Lockwood became Twitter-famous for weird, suggestive, unsexy “sext” tweets, and then literary-famous for an autobiographical poem entitled “Rape Joke.” The protagonist of the novel, by contrast, becomes famous for a post that reads only “Can a dog be twins,” and proudly writes down an observation about Thor’s hammer as a “chode metaphor.” These lines, to my ears, are meant to sound goofy and outré—deliberately not as good as what Lockwood usually tweets.
Despite such moments of self-disparagement, the protagonist is drawn to the internet, not just for its cabinets of curiosities (Chuck Grassley’s tweets!), nor for the news it transmits each day (school shootings, neo-fascism, climate change). She is drawn by the tiny philosophical problems that pepper daily life thanks to it:
She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they only become untrue when they entered someone else’s life and butted, trivial, up against its bigness?
Such passages, which seem likely to reflect Lockwood’s own thinking, both consider and enact literary confessing: like online sharing, it binds fiction and “true word[s]” in ways that even the writer might not be able to disentangle. The intricacies of confession are complicated by Lockwood’s actual real-life internet celebrity, by what one may or may not know of Lockwood’s own self-presentation on social media. The book may or may not be autofiction. The protagonist of this novel resembles the person Lockwood presents on Twitter and in her memoir: mercurial, unfiltered, given to falling over in public. The family of the novel’s second half is markedly close to that of Priestdaddy, Lockwood’s very funny memoir about her father. The ambiguity intensifies Lockwood’s reflections on what is one’s to tell or to splice with fiction, and about the difficulties of being truthful in any genre. Whatever the ratio of fiction to nonfiction, No One Is Talking About This is utterly convincing in how it registers everyday, idiosyncratic reactions. It amplifies the kinds of feelings for which we don’t have categories through its quick changes of register: tenderness followed by loud caricature, farce followed by insight. Here is one whole section, taken from the days after the ultrasound and before the diagnosis:
For a while all anyone could talk about was what the baby might be missing, in tones of portent and doom. “Forgive me for thinking,” she argued in the shower, “that every baby should get to have an ass. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!”
The comic end of Lockwood’s range of tones comes out here, in sentences that probably nobody has said before. The protagonist is again in the shower, this time actually arguing with that imagined listener. Her speech displays that the discourse of the internet now pervades even your private thoughts—both its tonalities (“a BABY! should get to have an ASS!”) and particular bits of its language. A random post can lodge in the protagonist’s head: sometimes throwaway phrases come back to haunt the person who says or reads them; at other times, they help one say something more clearly.
Beyond internet-speak, Lockwood’s command of metaphor is remarkable.
All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves.
That little streak of weirdness, the simile of the “soft pink machete,” helps keep this moment away from clichéd sentimentality. Or maybe sentimentality has been expanded to include feelings that aren’t clichéd: sentimentality is accepted as one legitimate and overpowering response that one has when faced with the baby, and the zany or goofy or garish might be a part of one’s sentiment.
Lockwood detects and preserves such unhomogenized reactions. She knows that emotions fluctuate wildly, and that devastation can include the distracted, the tacky, and the petty. One of the best examples of this knowledge comes near the end of No One is Talking About This, when the family is driving home after meeting with an undertaker. “Smooth” comes on the radio—the over-the-top Santana song whose opening line still persists in memes. The protagonist feels a “dead reflex [kick] in her throat. Had she ever found that funny? Or had the laughter waited, external, for her to give in and join it?” What is most conspicuous here is the short meditation on the collective nature of laughter (laughter is a preoccupation for Lockwood throughout). But after the earworm of “Smooth” starts playing in your head, you might hear the lyrics from the middle of the song, the lyrics Lockwood does not quote: they brush against the desperate wish to keep someone around longer. As the protagonist tells her husband at one point: “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes. [. . .] What was I doing with them before?” No One Is Talking About This captures how real-life feeling is a muddle even rangier and more inappropriate than the internet itself.