Patricia Lockwood’s new book No One is Talking About This feels more like a wake-up call than a novel. The first half is a tour through the internet’s weirdest memes and trends since Trump’s election in 2016. It references viral jokes, some fictional but mostly real, incomprehensible to anyone not well-acquainted with the internet. Do you understand what she means by “caucasian blink.gif”, how the word ‘binch’ is funnier than the word ‘bitch’, and why people comment “OH YES HUNNY” on pictures of young Stalin? If you don’t understand, then what have you been doing for the past four years? If you do, it’s probably a sign that you should go outside more.
Written in tweet-length, disjointed paragraphs, No One is Talking About This is a darkly funny work of autofiction. The unnamed protagonist is a woman much like Lockwood. She achieved internet fame for a viral tweet asking “Can a dog be twins?” and now travels around the world to talk on panels about the internet. To say that Part One of the novel follows this woman’s story would perhaps be an overstatement. It follows her in the same way that you follow a person on social media, seeing bursts of their life amidst an avalanche of memes and politics. She’s hard to grasp; a fuzzy shape that represents the homogenous sense of humour and loss of meaning forged by the internet, or “the portal”, as Lockwood calls the Twittersphere.
Then, the second half of the novel takes an unexpected turn from the collective internet consciousness into the personal. An emergency changes everything; the protagonist rushes back to her family home in Ohio. Part 2 of the novel is surprisingly tender, diluting the memes and politics with questions about parenthood, grief and family. In a different novel, the shift might feel disconcerting to the point of clumsiness. Lockwood, however, thrives on disconcerting. There’s a moment in Part One where the protagonist laughs at a video of people flung from a breaking fairground ride – “Their trajectories through the air were pure arcs of joy, T-shirts turned liquid on them” – before scrolling down to find that one of the people died in the accident. “Oh Christ, no, oh God!” she says, flatly. It’s the novel in microcosm: laughter followed by the inexpressible closeness of death.
Before her first novel, Lockwood published poetry, essays and a brilliant 2017 memoir called Priestdaddy about being the daughter of a Catholic priest. She was a Twitter celebrity long before her blistering poem Rape Joke went viral in 2013 and cemented her literary reputation. In all of her writing, Lockwood has an unusual power over language. She crafts unexpected similes that make her poetry, prose and even her tweets glitter. In the novel, she describes internet cancel culture: “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 a heinous substitution in guacamole.” Writing about the internet can often feel dry and disembodied, but Lockwood’s descriptions are striking.
The vibrancy of Lockwood’s language and the uneasy subject matter make No One is Talking About This stand out among a recent surge of internet novels. Rapidly shifting between hilarious, horrifying and poignant, it’s a rare novel with the power to stare into your soul and see how the internet has changed you. The funnier you find the first half, the more exposed you feel in the second. It’s a wake-up call, sure, but it’s an exquisite one.
No One is Talking About This is published by Bloomsbury
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