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No One Is Talking About This
A book that asks: Is there life after the internet?
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.
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.
210 pages, Hardcover
First published February 16, 2021
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February 8, 2021
I understand what this novel was trying to do and it is witty and at times genuinely moving. It does feel like two novels in one. The first is a novel about what it means to be Very Online and if you aren’t, I am not sure that it will make sense. The second is about a a family managing a terrible tragedy and how it magnified what really matters and does not matter. I really enjoyed this but I did wish the two novels felt more like one. Regardless, Lockwood is a phenomenal writer who is a keen observer of the strangeness of online culture and the fragility of the human heart.
April 10, 2022
‘A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world.’
Doomscrolling, thirst traps, subtweets, chonky bois, stans, sliding into DMs, shouting YAS or saying a MOOD tbh… the landscape of social media has forever altered our lexicon, our politics, our social interactions and more. It’s a rapidly shifting world with a new main character everyday (the goal of twitter, of course, is to remain as active as possible but never BE the main character) and can be an utter minefield of social anxieties and attacks. And we love it. But how has this altered the way we engage with the world around us, especially in wake of tragedy? There are few people better equipped to tell a narrative of being Extremely Online than the Poet Laureate of Twitter herself, Patricia Lockwood. Author of the much acclaimed 2017 memoir Priestdaddy, Patricia @TriciaLockwood Lockwood has made a smash through social media, her poem Rape Joke having been a viral hit and even meeting her now-husband in a poetry chatroom. No One is Talking About This plays close to autofiction as it follows a twitter-celebrity as she speaks at social media conferences around the world and generally shitposts and laughs her way through the online community termed here as The Portal. The book takes an abrupt turn when, having existed so long in the hellscape of twitter she isn’t sure how to interact as a normal human anymore and tragedy strikes her family. From laugh-out-loud-until-you-cry funny to actually sobbing, this book is an emotional rollercoaster through our modern condition brought to life through Lockwood’s satirical and cutting observations.
‘It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.’
This is the great Twitter novel we’ve always assumed someone would write, and as someone who is shamelessly very online myself I definitely felt this novel quite profoundly. Being both in on the jokes and the butt of the jokes, I suspect anyone who has ever paused to reflect on the nature of social media and the bizarre psychology of twitter (or really any social media) will get a lot from Lockwood’s musings. Lockwood preserves the vernacular of the last few years and this book is overflowing with references to viral tweets and passing social media quirks (LitHub has brilliantly annotated all the memes and references here). ‘It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus,’ Lockwood writes about keeping on pace with social media, ‘produce the perfect sneaze of it [sic], and then mutate it into something new.’. Anyone who has clamoured to reproduce a new meme or spent an afternoon perfecting the perfect parody of Williams’ This Is Just to Say will feel seen, as they say. The humor here is crude but on point, with jokes about parents using horny emojis without knowing what they mean, kinks, perverted viral commercials, etc.
The book fairly well reproduces a twitter feed in style, with staccato sentences and rapid fire thoughts spaced out on the page. While Lockwood credits David Markson for much of the inspiration, she admits the layout was for this exact purpose in an interview with the New Yorker:
The communal consciousness is what Lockwood seeks to unpack. This all feels particularly poignant as the book is set mid-Trump administration (referred to humorously as ‘the dictator’ in the book) when online interactions turned up the heat even as we realized so much of the behavior everyone rallied against was formed and perpetuated through social media.
We live in a world where ‘ A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth,’ where I have relatives that followed me to see photos of my children and then posted on my graduation from college post that I should be lined up with my classmates and shot because college was ‘liberal brainwashing’. SOCIAL MEDIA IS FUN GUYS I SWEAR THANKS UNCLE JIM! Lockwood examines the ways our interactions with people have shifted, as well as the way we receive information and what responsibility we have to what we put out into the world. He comments, for example, on how it was likely she saw Heather Heyer’s death at Charlottesville even before Heather’s own mother would have been notified. We built this technology and corporations are making way too much money with it for there to be any chance we will turn it off, so buckle up, humanity, here we go. However, at the same time it is a really useful and beautiful tool to interact with people around the globe, share ideas, share love, spread awareness, help people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get out or around interact, etc, so it’s all a very double-edged sword so to speak. I’m thankful for a platform such as this to share and discuss books with all of you, and I really value many of the friendships I’ve made on here and other platforms and cool opportunities I wouldn’t have had without it. So thanks, social media. @poe_a_tree is me if you want to follow, I wouldn't.
For the first half of the book we follow the musings of the narrator who became famous for the simple tweet ‘can a dog be twins? (‘is this your contribution to society?’ someone aggresses on her at a conference holding up a printout of that tweet), which parodies Lockwood's own viral hit 'So is Paris any good or not' on twitter. She laughs at herself and the way she turns everything into a joke, shouting ‘shoot it into my veins’ at funny posts and wondering why is she like this. Then comes part two and the floor drops out. A quick text from her mother asking her to come home cues up a really tragic narrative switch to her sister’s unborn baby being diagnosed with Proteus Syndrome, a ‘one-in-a-billion diagnoses’ best known for being the condition of the ’Elephant Man’, Joseph Merrick. This section is all the more tragic knowing it is based on Lockwood and her sister’s real experiences. Heads up, this book is going to make you cry and the way the two sections don’t seem to quite blend together is an excellent example of the way ‘real’ life and online don’t quite blend either (Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler is another recent book to tackle this idea).
‘There is still a real life to be lived,’ the narrator must remind herself as she is plunged back into figuring out how to be a person again and not a content-creator. The ongoings of the Portal suddenly don’t seem interesting or enlightened anymore and the frailty of life is examined as something bittersweet. Her traditionally conservative and pro-life family is suddenly met with one of the instances they’ve disbelieved their whole life and everyone is confronted with the sadness of it all. Being conservative Ohio, this is also timed with a turnover in the Supreme Court that has brought reproductive rights to the center stage of public political discourse and only amplifies the severity of her sister’s lack of options and women like her.
What proceeds from here is very moving, heartbreaking and very real. Seriously, get ready for tears.
Lockwood has done something really special here. While sure, it might not age well, it also seems a great way to both memorialize the brief life of her niece as well as our current period of time. Lockwood even mocks her own endeavour, talking about how books about online life ‘had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement’, so at least she is self aware. Brilliantly observant despite being a bit too on-the-nose, this is a really moving book that is also seriously very funny. No One is Talking About This will, in fact, be a book people will be talking about. Don’t @ me.
4/5
‘What did we have the right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politicians promised us? The realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we ... could we post about it?’
Doomscrolling, thirst traps, subtweets, chonky bois, stans, sliding into DMs, shouting YAS or saying a MOOD tbh… the landscape of social media has forever altered our lexicon, our politics, our social interactions and more. It’s a rapidly shifting world with a new main character everyday (the goal of twitter, of course, is to remain as active as possible but never BE the main character) and can be an utter minefield of social anxieties and attacks. And we love it. But how has this altered the way we engage with the world around us, especially in wake of tragedy? There are few people better equipped to tell a narrative of being Extremely Online than the Poet Laureate of Twitter herself, Patricia Lockwood. Author of the much acclaimed 2017 memoir Priestdaddy, Patricia @TriciaLockwood Lockwood has made a smash through social media, her poem Rape Joke having been a viral hit and even meeting her now-husband in a poetry chatroom. No One is Talking About This plays close to autofiction as it follows a twitter-celebrity as she speaks at social media conferences around the world and generally shitposts and laughs her way through the online community termed here as The Portal. The book takes an abrupt turn when, having existed so long in the hellscape of twitter she isn’t sure how to interact as a normal human anymore and tragedy strikes her family. From laugh-out-loud-until-you-cry funny to actually sobbing, this book is an emotional rollercoaster through our modern condition brought to life through Lockwood’s satirical and cutting observations.
‘It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.’
This is the great Twitter novel we’ve always assumed someone would write, and as someone who is shamelessly very online myself I definitely felt this novel quite profoundly. Being both in on the jokes and the butt of the jokes, I suspect anyone who has ever paused to reflect on the nature of social media and the bizarre psychology of twitter (or really any social media) will get a lot from Lockwood’s musings. Lockwood preserves the vernacular of the last few years and this book is overflowing with references to viral tweets and passing social media quirks (LitHub has brilliantly annotated all the memes and references here). ‘It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus,’ Lockwood writes about keeping on pace with social media, ‘produce the perfect sneaze of it [sic], and then mutate it into something new.’. Anyone who has clamoured to reproduce a new meme or spent an afternoon perfecting the perfect parody of Williams’ This Is Just to Say will feel seen, as they say. The humor here is crude but on point, with jokes about parents using horny emojis without knowing what they mean, kinks, perverted viral commercials, etc.
The book fairly well reproduces a twitter feed in style, with staccato sentences and rapid fire thoughts spaced out on the page. While Lockwood credits David Markson for much of the inspiration, she admits the layout was for this exact purpose in an interview with the New Yorker:
The empty space is interrupted by these brief bursts of communal consciousness. The movement among these small explosions is what provides the plot, the ambulation. The arrangement and the presentation are what make it fictional, as the selves we present in the portal are fictional.’
The communal consciousness is what Lockwood seeks to unpack. This all feels particularly poignant as the book is set mid-Trump administration (referred to humorously as ‘the dictator’ in the book) when online interactions turned up the heat even as we realized so much of the behavior everyone rallied against was formed and perpetuated through social media.
’Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian’
We live in a world where ‘ A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth,’ where I have relatives that followed me to see photos of my children and then posted on my graduation from college post that I should be lined up with my classmates and shot because college was ‘liberal brainwashing’. SOCIAL MEDIA IS FUN GUYS I SWEAR THANKS UNCLE JIM! Lockwood examines the ways our interactions with people have shifted, as well as the way we receive information and what responsibility we have to what we put out into the world. He comments, for example, on how it was likely she saw Heather Heyer’s death at Charlottesville even before Heather’s own mother would have been notified. We built this technology and corporations are making way too much money with it for there to be any chance we will turn it off, so buckle up, humanity, here we go. However, at the same time it is a really useful and beautiful tool to interact with people around the globe, share ideas, share love, spread awareness, help people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get out or around interact, etc, so it’s all a very double-edged sword so to speak. I’m thankful for a platform such as this to share and discuss books with all of you, and I really value many of the friendships I’ve made on here and other platforms and cool opportunities I wouldn’t have had without it. So thanks, social media. @poe_a_tree is me if you want to follow, I wouldn't.
For the first half of the book we follow the musings of the narrator who became famous for the simple tweet ‘can a dog be twins? (‘is this your contribution to society?’ someone aggresses on her at a conference holding up a printout of that tweet), which parodies Lockwood's own viral hit 'So is Paris any good or not' on twitter. She laughs at herself and the way she turns everything into a joke, shouting ‘shoot it into my veins’ at funny posts and wondering why is she like this. Then comes part two and the floor drops out. A quick text from her mother asking her to come home cues up a really tragic narrative switch to her sister’s unborn baby being diagnosed with Proteus Syndrome, a ‘one-in-a-billion diagnoses’ best known for being the condition of the ’Elephant Man’, Joseph Merrick. This section is all the more tragic knowing it is based on Lockwood and her sister’s real experiences. Heads up, this book is going to make you cry and the way the two sections don’t seem to quite blend together is an excellent example of the way ‘real’ life and online don’t quite blend either (Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler is another recent book to tackle this idea).
‘There is still a real life to be lived,’ the narrator must remind herself as she is plunged back into figuring out how to be a person again and not a content-creator. The ongoings of the Portal suddenly don’t seem interesting or enlightened anymore and the frailty of life is examined as something bittersweet. Her traditionally conservative and pro-life family is suddenly met with one of the instances they’ve disbelieved their whole life and everyone is confronted with the sadness of it all. Being conservative Ohio, this is also timed with a turnover in the Supreme Court that has brought reproductive rights to the center stage of public political discourse and only amplifies the severity of her sister’s lack of options and women like her.
‘The faces of the senators were always comfortably closed against them, like doors on a federal holiday. Because the worst case scenarios had happened to them, the women must have done something to deserve it. They knew nothing about this period...when we were not yet the people it happened to.
What proceeds from here is very moving, heartbreaking and very real. Seriously, get ready for tears.
Lockwood has done something really special here. While sure, it might not age well, it also seems a great way to both memorialize the brief life of her niece as well as our current period of time. Lockwood even mocks her own endeavour, talking about how books about online life ‘had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement’, so at least she is self aware. Brilliantly observant despite being a bit too on-the-nose, this is a really moving book that is also seriously very funny. No One is Talking About This will, in fact, be a book people will be talking about. Don’t @ me.
4/5
‘What did we have the right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politicians promised us? The realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we ... could we post about it?’
February 14, 2024
I almost never give really high ratings.
Primarily, this is because I am very critical and cynical, which is a nice way of saying that I'm mean and nightmarish to be around.
But I think there is probably another reason, and that reason is that I f*cking hate writing positive reviews.
I was brought into this world to complain. My purpose in life is to drag others down ever so slightly. My goals include being the biggest hater I can and subsisting as close to off cookies alone as humanly possible. (The second one is unrelated, but equally important.)
And by definition, reviews of books I have found to be extremely good offer very little opportunity to do any of this.
But here we are. Another five star.
This book is very funny. It is also very sad. It sums up what it is to be Terminally Online, and it also sums up what it is to love and be loved, to find fulfillment and lose it, to grieve.
That's a lot to accomplish in barely 200 pages. Add to that the fact that I laughed (weird to do by yourself in semi-darkness while staring at words on paper), I kind of cried (previously weird to do, but now something I apparently do every time I like anything, which is fortunately for aforementioned reasons not that often), and I still think about it sometimes even though it's been a month since I read it (I put off reviews as much as possible), and it deserves 4.5 stars. At least.
Unfortunately for us all.
Bottom line: So good it may ruin my reputation. And also my enjoyment of review-writing.
----------------
pre-review
i laughed, i cried. how often can you say that seriously?
review to come / 4.5 at least maybe 5 probably 5
----------------
currently-reading updates
this book has been on my can't wait to read shelf for a year and yet i have let 3 separate library holds expire.
let's try this again.
----------------
tbr review
very funny title for a book people won't stop telling me to read..........
Primarily, this is because I am very critical and cynical, which is a nice way of saying that I'm mean and nightmarish to be around.
But I think there is probably another reason, and that reason is that I f*cking hate writing positive reviews.
I was brought into this world to complain. My purpose in life is to drag others down ever so slightly. My goals include being the biggest hater I can and subsisting as close to off cookies alone as humanly possible. (The second one is unrelated, but equally important.)
And by definition, reviews of books I have found to be extremely good offer very little opportunity to do any of this.
But here we are. Another five star.
This book is very funny. It is also very sad. It sums up what it is to be Terminally Online, and it also sums up what it is to love and be loved, to find fulfillment and lose it, to grieve.
That's a lot to accomplish in barely 200 pages. Add to that the fact that I laughed (weird to do by yourself in semi-darkness while staring at words on paper), I kind of cried (previously weird to do, but now something I apparently do every time I like anything, which is fortunately for aforementioned reasons not that often), and I still think about it sometimes even though it's been a month since I read it (I put off reviews as much as possible), and it deserves 4.5 stars. At least.
Unfortunately for us all.
Bottom line: So good it may ruin my reputation. And also my enjoyment of review-writing.
----------------
pre-review
i laughed, i cried. how often can you say that seriously?
review to come / 4.5 at least maybe 5 probably 5
----------------
currently-reading updates
this book has been on my can't wait to read shelf for a year and yet i have let 3 separate library holds expire.
let's try this again.
----------------
tbr review
very funny title for a book people won't stop telling me to read..........
September 14, 2021
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2021
No One is Talking About This is surely going to divide opinion—you’ll either think it’s brilliant or massively overhyped. Put me in the former camp.
The first half reads like the Twitter Annual 2017—a sort of memorialisation of the specific memes, banter and humour of a specific tiny period in history. As a not-very-online person, some of these I recognised (remember when everyone in the world read ‘Cat Person’ on the same day?), most I did not, some I thought I didn’t... until I googled them and realised, yes, I definitely did.
When I was at school we had these school-issued diaries—planners really—that we were supposed to use to organise our class schedules, but of course we instead circulated them among our friends all year and filled them with in-jokes, weird humour, good and bad art. They were ephemeral, unlike year books, and we never thought to keep them. Part 1 of this book reminded me of those diaries: the impulse to create bonds and sense of community through this kind of throwaway banter, a shared language. If I could see one of those old diaries now it would no doubt be filled with unfunny and incomprehensible nonsense, it wouldn’t ‘hold up’ to the passing time, but that’s beside the point.
Lockwood gives us one of those diaries, or at least the modern equivalent, in a capsule of communal online life from just a few years ago. She shows us how quickly the punchlines fade, yes, but more importantly, why that community feeling is so seductive, how good it feels to be in on the joke, and how hard you have to hustle to stay current when everything is passé five minutes after it was cool. The fragments and the arch, ironic tone won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and after a while it was starting to wear on me. But then…
There is a dramatic shift in tone from Part 1 to Part 2. This move is jarring, but it serves a very real narrative purpose: this book is about the stark contrast between Extremely Online life and what we call Real Life; it’s about the sudden shock of being jolted from one to the other by tragic events. Lockwood is performing a very clever trick here, underscoring the character’s emotional whiplash by giving the reader emotional whiplash too.
Part 2 is a deeply emotional story about grief and love, while also raising questions about who gets to be seen in the online social media world, whose lives are deemed to be worth documenting this way. The fragmentary prose style remains consistent even as the subject matter darkens, emphasising the short distance between tweets and poetry at times. It’s very moving and by the time I finished and read all the way to the end of the Acknowledgements I was wiping away tears.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2021
No One is Talking About This is surely going to divide opinion—you’ll either think it’s brilliant or massively overhyped. Put me in the former camp.
The first half reads like the Twitter Annual 2017—a sort of memorialisation of the specific memes, banter and humour of a specific tiny period in history. As a not-very-online person, some of these I recognised (remember when everyone in the world read ‘Cat Person’ on the same day?), most I did not, some I thought I didn’t... until I googled them and realised, yes, I definitely did.
When I was at school we had these school-issued diaries—planners really—that we were supposed to use to organise our class schedules, but of course we instead circulated them among our friends all year and filled them with in-jokes, weird humour, good and bad art. They were ephemeral, unlike year books, and we never thought to keep them. Part 1 of this book reminded me of those diaries: the impulse to create bonds and sense of community through this kind of throwaway banter, a shared language. If I could see one of those old diaries now it would no doubt be filled with unfunny and incomprehensible nonsense, it wouldn’t ‘hold up’ to the passing time, but that’s beside the point.
Lockwood gives us one of those diaries, or at least the modern equivalent, in a capsule of communal online life from just a few years ago. She shows us how quickly the punchlines fade, yes, but more importantly, why that community feeling is so seductive, how good it feels to be in on the joke, and how hard you have to hustle to stay current when everything is passé five minutes after it was cool. The fragments and the arch, ironic tone won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and after a while it was starting to wear on me. But then…
There is a dramatic shift in tone from Part 1 to Part 2. This move is jarring, but it serves a very real narrative purpose: this book is about the stark contrast between Extremely Online life and what we call Real Life; it’s about the sudden shock of being jolted from one to the other by tragic events. Lockwood is performing a very clever trick here, underscoring the character’s emotional whiplash by giving the reader emotional whiplash too.
“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.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”
Part 2 is a deeply emotional story about grief and love, while also raising questions about who gets to be seen in the online social media world, whose lives are deemed to be worth documenting this way. The fragmentary prose style remains consistent even as the subject matter darkens, emphasising the short distance between tweets and poetry at times. It’s very moving and by the time I finished and read all the way to the end of the Acknowledgements I was wiping away tears.
September 14, 2021
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 *siiiigh*
Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021
This autofictional account of grief could be deeply moving, if it wasn't so disparate and full of gratuitous non-insights about digital communication. Split into two parts, we first meet a narrator who is obsessed with the internet, which is referred to as "the portal". The text presents lots of weird twitter stuff pushing the deeply conservative attitude that all digital communication is necessarily deficient communication, contributing to the atomization of society and causing those partaking in the world of social media platforms to develop levels of dysfunction that inhibit them from fully interacting with the real world (ha, hello part 2, but I won't spoil the plot). Hot take: The quality and effects of digital media and communication depend on the individual user's media competence, which also goes for TV (which does not necessarily make you dumber), newspapers (which do not necessarily make you smarter) etc. Plus: You can say a lot about the twitter humor dished out here, but funny it is not.
This kind of fishing for applause in the "o tempra, o mores"-pond generally annoys me to no end, but then part 2 hits and tells a moving story about the narrator's family being struck by grief due to an unforeseeable and unchangeable turn of destiny. Reading the acknowledgements, many of the events presented have apparently really taken place. Why oh why does this story have to be combined with a lengthy, shallow first part that then keeps showing up in the second half? Because the digital world and real life clash? Come on, Patricia Lockwood, this is so below your intellectual capabilities, give us more of that emotional truth and deep insight from part 2!
All in all, an uneven effort by a talented writer who wastes half her text smugly chillaxing in platitudes about twitter when she could actually challenge and emotionally touch readers, as proven in the second half.
Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021
This autofictional account of grief could be deeply moving, if it wasn't so disparate and full of gratuitous non-insights about digital communication. Split into two parts, we first meet a narrator who is obsessed with the internet, which is referred to as "the portal". The text presents lots of weird twitter stuff pushing the deeply conservative attitude that all digital communication is necessarily deficient communication, contributing to the atomization of society and causing those partaking in the world of social media platforms to develop levels of dysfunction that inhibit them from fully interacting with the real world (ha, hello part 2, but I won't spoil the plot). Hot take: The quality and effects of digital media and communication depend on the individual user's media competence, which also goes for TV (which does not necessarily make you dumber), newspapers (which do not necessarily make you smarter) etc. Plus: You can say a lot about the twitter humor dished out here, but funny it is not.
This kind of fishing for applause in the "o tempra, o mores"-pond generally annoys me to no end, but then part 2 hits and tells a moving story about the narrator's family being struck by grief due to an unforeseeable and unchangeable turn of destiny. Reading the acknowledgements, many of the events presented have apparently really taken place. Why oh why does this story have to be combined with a lengthy, shallow first part that then keeps showing up in the second half? Because the digital world and real life clash? Come on, Patricia Lockwood, this is so below your intellectual capabilities, give us more of that emotional truth and deep insight from part 2!
All in all, an uneven effort by a talented writer who wastes half her text smugly chillaxing in platitudes about twitter when she could actually challenge and emotionally touch readers, as proven in the second half.
February 22, 2021
This is ... quite possibly ... the worst book I've ever read.
It made literally no sense. There is no plot, no development, no rhyme or reason between each paragraph. It is bafflingly shit and I cannot for the life of me comprehend the high ratings when it makes no sense??? What the fuck is going on???
It made literally no sense. There is no plot, no development, no rhyme or reason between each paragraph. It is bafflingly shit and I cannot for the life of me comprehend the high ratings when it makes no sense??? What the fuck is going on???
September 2, 2021
Audiobook… read by Kristen Sieh
……4 hours and 13
minutes.
If ‘NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS’….(book) …. I could understand.
But that’s not the case.
It’s a Man Booker Prize nominee. People are talkin.
I quit reading this novel months ago.
I chose the audiobook this time… finishing it.
The voice-reader was the best part— she did an excellent job.
But…
…..I hated this book with a capital H!!!
I hated the righteous confidence of every sentence.
It felt pretentious—silly—ridiculous—and very annoying!
….I didn’t care about octopus sliding their bodies onto dryland—
or…
….drugstore lube that would not be strong enough for the women’s sex life
or
….give a rats ass if twin dogs made a person famous
or
….watching bodies that were not bodies—going uphill through graveyards.
or
blaming myself for not being smart enough—savvy enough, to appreciate this book.
It falls into my ‘fiction- nonsense’ reads.
Many of my friends liked it a lot. They’re smarter than I am. But…
I don’t want to fall into the old thinking of what’s wrong with me. I just didn’t like it AT ALL!!!
……4 hours and 13
minutes.
If ‘NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS’….(book) …. I could understand.
But that’s not the case.
It’s a Man Booker Prize nominee. People are talkin.
I quit reading this novel months ago.
I chose the audiobook this time… finishing it.
The voice-reader was the best part— she did an excellent job.
But…
…..I hated this book with a capital H!!!
I hated the righteous confidence of every sentence.
It felt pretentious—silly—ridiculous—and very annoying!
….I didn’t care about octopus sliding their bodies onto dryland—
or…
….drugstore lube that would not be strong enough for the women’s sex life
or
….give a rats ass if twin dogs made a person famous
or
….watching bodies that were not bodies—going uphill through graveyards.
or
blaming myself for not being smart enough—savvy enough, to appreciate this book.
It falls into my ‘fiction- nonsense’ reads.
Many of my friends liked it a lot. They’re smarter than I am. But…
I don’t want to fall into the old thinking of what’s wrong with me. I just didn’t like it AT ALL!!!
April 20, 2021
“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
This one took me by surprise, friends! It is very clever, often humorous, ultimately moving and always compulsively readable. I rarely pick up new releases. I’m not one to jump at the latest trends in anything – I like to see what has staying power before investing my time and money. Only once in a while do I take a chance and just go for it; occasionally the risk pays off. It sure did with this reading choice! I confess that from time to time some of this went over my head, but in no way did it ever lessen my enjoyment. The subject matter is highly relevant to today’s online world and the manner in which we handle our online personas as well as the information we take in constantly from a number of social media platforms. In this work of auto-fiction, author Patricia Lockwood uses the term portal rather than Internet or Twitter or some such site.
“When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged 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.”
“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.”
I use social media (thank you Goodreads for saving me from most of the other options out there), but I would not call myself savvy at all. I have a Facebook account which I last posted to more than three years ago (not counting a much needed update to my profile picture.) Most Instagram users would laugh if they saw the number of followers I have. I’ve never had a Twitter account. I have a teenage daughter who frequently points out my inappropriate use of memes and is constantly having to explain both her texts as well as other posts I ‘totally don’t get.’ I’m a lost cause. And yet, this book seized me and would not let go! The entire first section of the book is a loosely structured, stream-of-consciousness format that reads much like one post after another or thoughts based on those posts. The narrator became an instant sensation after a popular tweet. She travels the world speaking at conferences, gaining more fame while continuing to jump into the portal as often as ever. I nodded my head at some revelations, laughed at some absurdities, and stared into the abyss at references I sometimes didn’t understand. Added all together, however, it truly resonated. How do we fit into a world that feels increasingly connected in one way, but also untethered or ungrounded from ‘real life’? In search of a way to cure isolation and loneliness, we often find ourselves even further withdrawn than before.
“You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.”
When the narrator is suddenly summoned back home following an urgent text, the reader is jolted back to reality right along with her. The second portion of the novel takes on a different tone, but the structure remains the same. This is never a fluid narrative. And while I’m typically a fan of a more traditional narrative style, this continued to work for me. I’m not going to say anything more about the last section, because that would be spoiling it for you. All I will say is that it’s much more personal. It’s very moving. It’s real life. Rather than telling us that we MUST disconnect from our online lives however, it ultimately seems to ask us to consider what truly matters. Can we find some sort of balance? Does the internet in fact give us the opportunity to preserve a life, to document it in a meaningful way that maybe at least someone will talk about it someday?
“What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract?”
This one took me by surprise, friends! It is very clever, often humorous, ultimately moving and always compulsively readable. I rarely pick up new releases. I’m not one to jump at the latest trends in anything – I like to see what has staying power before investing my time and money. Only once in a while do I take a chance and just go for it; occasionally the risk pays off. It sure did with this reading choice! I confess that from time to time some of this went over my head, but in no way did it ever lessen my enjoyment. The subject matter is highly relevant to today’s online world and the manner in which we handle our online personas as well as the information we take in constantly from a number of social media platforms. In this work of auto-fiction, author Patricia Lockwood uses the term portal rather than Internet or Twitter or some such site.
“When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged 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.”
“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.”
I use social media (thank you Goodreads for saving me from most of the other options out there), but I would not call myself savvy at all. I have a Facebook account which I last posted to more than three years ago (not counting a much needed update to my profile picture.) Most Instagram users would laugh if they saw the number of followers I have. I’ve never had a Twitter account. I have a teenage daughter who frequently points out my inappropriate use of memes and is constantly having to explain both her texts as well as other posts I ‘totally don’t get.’ I’m a lost cause. And yet, this book seized me and would not let go! The entire first section of the book is a loosely structured, stream-of-consciousness format that reads much like one post after another or thoughts based on those posts. The narrator became an instant sensation after a popular tweet. She travels the world speaking at conferences, gaining more fame while continuing to jump into the portal as often as ever. I nodded my head at some revelations, laughed at some absurdities, and stared into the abyss at references I sometimes didn’t understand. Added all together, however, it truly resonated. How do we fit into a world that feels increasingly connected in one way, but also untethered or ungrounded from ‘real life’? In search of a way to cure isolation and loneliness, we often find ourselves even further withdrawn than before.
“You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.”
When the narrator is suddenly summoned back home following an urgent text, the reader is jolted back to reality right along with her. The second portion of the novel takes on a different tone, but the structure remains the same. This is never a fluid narrative. And while I’m typically a fan of a more traditional narrative style, this continued to work for me. I’m not going to say anything more about the last section, because that would be spoiling it for you. All I will say is that it’s much more personal. It’s very moving. It’s real life. Rather than telling us that we MUST disconnect from our online lives however, it ultimately seems to ask us to consider what truly matters. Can we find some sort of balance? Does the internet in fact give us the opportunity to preserve a life, to document it in a meaningful way that maybe at least someone will talk about it someday?
“What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract?”
February 26, 2022
Internet Poisoning
That the internet is primarily a purveyor of trivia is obvious to anyone. The big revelation is that human life is nothing but trivia. Our access to the trivial lives of others overwhelms the not-trivial which also therefore becomes trivial. We’ve all been swallowed by the big hippo. We live in a world of gossip. It’s been abuilding for some time before anyone noticed how strange it all is.
According to Yuval Harari (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it started with the great Cognitive Revolution of the species Homo Sapiens, in which we discovered language and its promotion of speculative thought: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." Gossip clearly has its uses.
But according to Thomas Ligotti (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), gossip exists only to distract us from the reality of our existence as “hunks of spoiling flesh on deteriorating bones.” We tell each other stories that we claim reveal, explain or define reality. It is the stories that become our habitat in which the prevailing misery and horror of the world is diluted, mitigated, or otherwise explained away. From that place of delusional safety we impose enormous destruction upon the rest of the world as well as ourselves. Gossip deludes, obscures, parodies, and dulls the world.
So it turns out that the thing that evolved to protect us, language, has always been our greatest threat (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Now that language has become as pervasive, as confusing, as oppressive as the reality it replaced, we become aware of the threat. We are aware of too much suffering; too many wrongs; too many opinions, arguments, conclusions and nonsense. We are perplexed. Whatever we say contributes to the problem. Saying nothing is unthinkable. Silence means loss of identity. Gossip is a drug and we are addicted to it:
The portal of language is everywhere, more enticing than a group session at a halfway house for coke heads. Mind isn’t that thing inside our heads; mind is out there. Not in other people’s heads but in the traces of what is written and said. These convince us we’re OK. Who is willing to lose his/her/their mind by abdicating one’s role in this collective mind? But there is hope. The contents of the collective mind has become primarily gossip about gossip. I mean c’mon, who believes this stuff? Who cares about any of it for more than a week or two? Gossip is transient and ultimately unsatisfying.
So a sort of technological autism is on the rise. Only the autistic understand reality. They know language is untrustworthy. Only the non-electronic has real significance. The ethical has nothing to do with ethics, just kind behaviour. High function autism has become a necessary life skill. Survival depends on not listening, not reading but only pretending to. As language is progressively degraded (by promoting itself), it is being exposed as noxious, arbitrary, and completely unreal. It’s worse than the reality it substitutes for. Gossip is poisoning itself (the central point of the Birds Aren’t Real movement one supposes):
Then reality strikes with a vengeance. No one talks about this because it is too serious, too hard, too authentically personal. And gossip is seen for the trivia it is.
That the internet is primarily a purveyor of trivia is obvious to anyone. The big revelation is that human life is nothing but trivia. Our access to the trivial lives of others overwhelms the not-trivial which also therefore becomes trivial. We’ve all been swallowed by the big hippo. We live in a world of gossip. It’s been abuilding for some time before anyone noticed how strange it all is.
According to Yuval Harari (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it started with the great Cognitive Revolution of the species Homo Sapiens, in which we discovered language and its promotion of speculative thought: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." Gossip clearly has its uses.
But according to Thomas Ligotti (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), gossip exists only to distract us from the reality of our existence as “hunks of spoiling flesh on deteriorating bones.” We tell each other stories that we claim reveal, explain or define reality. It is the stories that become our habitat in which the prevailing misery and horror of the world is diluted, mitigated, or otherwise explained away. From that place of delusional safety we impose enormous destruction upon the rest of the world as well as ourselves. Gossip deludes, obscures, parodies, and dulls the world.
So it turns out that the thing that evolved to protect us, language, has always been our greatest threat (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Now that language has become as pervasive, as confusing, as oppressive as the reality it replaced, we become aware of the threat. We are aware of too much suffering; too many wrongs; too many opinions, arguments, conclusions and nonsense. We are perplexed. Whatever we say contributes to the problem. Saying nothing is unthinkable. Silence means loss of identity. Gossip is a drug and we are addicted to it:
“In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.”
The portal of language is everywhere, more enticing than a group session at a halfway house for coke heads. Mind isn’t that thing inside our heads; mind is out there. Not in other people’s heads but in the traces of what is written and said. These convince us we’re OK. Who is willing to lose his/her/their mind by abdicating one’s role in this collective mind? But there is hope. The contents of the collective mind has become primarily gossip about gossip. I mean c’mon, who believes this stuff? Who cares about any of it for more than a week or two? Gossip is transient and ultimately unsatisfying.
“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
So a sort of technological autism is on the rise. Only the autistic understand reality. They know language is untrustworthy. Only the non-electronic has real significance. The ethical has nothing to do with ethics, just kind behaviour. High function autism has become a necessary life skill. Survival depends on not listening, not reading but only pretending to. As language is progressively degraded (by promoting itself), it is being exposed as noxious, arbitrary, and completely unreal. It’s worse than the reality it substitutes for. Gossip is poisoning itself (the central point of the Birds Aren’t Real movement one supposes):
“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us…”
Then reality strikes with a vengeance. No one talks about this because it is too serious, too hard, too authentically personal. And gossip is seen for the trivia it is.
May 12, 2022
My favourite tweet from the Poet Laureate of Twitter - her first of September - https://twitter.com/TriciaLockwood/st...
Now fully deserved winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize.
I re-read this book (is it a re-read if the first time was an audio book?) following its deserved shortlisting for 2021 Women's Prize - now joined by a rare double shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize.
I have to say that on a second (or first) read I think the book was even better than the first time
Original review
From your experience you know Patricia Lockwood to be (tick all the correct answers)
a) Author of the memoir “Priestdaddy” and an highly thoughtful contributor to the London Review of Books
b) Author of the harrrowing viral poem “Rape Joke”
c) Originator of the Twitter concept of ironical sexts (sample: “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter You put your whole head through me”) and author of one of the all time great literary tweets: @parisreview. So is Paris any good or not
All three are true but depending on if your answer was more a/b (or even none of the above) than b/c may depend on how you engage with the first half of this book - a novel in which the the author aims with some success to re-cast cutting edge literary fiction for the world of Twitter, but largely by adopting and reproducing the memes of Twitter.
The first person narrator of the novel is unnamed, but the book is heavily autofictional.
Lockwood has remarked with some profundity that the reason that so much fiction is now autofictional is that Google allows us to discover that it is (whereas previously we would know of author’s lives only what they chose to reveal) – a quote I found out when Googling to see how much of this novel was autofictional.
The narrator has gained fame in the Portal (Lockwood’s term Twitter - not as many reviews seem to claim the entire internet - given that the word “internet” is used at least once in proximity to the Portal) for a single viral tweet: Can a dog be twins?.
Now her life seems to consist of two main parts – sitting on her chair participating in the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal and travelling around the world talking about the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal – and the first part’s plot matches this The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair.
The book is a series of (to quote Lauren Oyler’s narattor in “Fake Account”) “Necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel.” - a style that is familiar now from Jenny Offill (and others) and was parodied (slightly unsuccessfully in my view) in Oyler’s novel but which Lockwood and her narrator defend (with reservations)
Many if not most of the sections are about viral tweets and memes, almost all I think taken from 2018, very little of which is actually explained - and I have seen some criticism of this. But then I can think of a book (a book of course referenced in my opening quote) which for full appreciation relies on an encyclopedic knowledge in one City on a single day in 1904 (or tens of pages explaining the references) and that is considered perhaps the greatest novel of all time.
Returning to this novel - for those who haunted the internet that year to the extent of the narrator’s inhabitation of planet Portal (and who are likely the a/b of my introduction) much I think will be very familiar indeed and bring lots of knowing smiles that come when you get or are reminded of a shared in-joke (and so much of this section is about how the Portal is a form of shared consciousness and shared jokes and ideas – and of how difficult it is to convey that sense to future generations or to those not of the Portal).
For those like me who did not – the choices I think are fourfold: (1) to ignore the memes altogether; (2) to cheat; (3) to google-while-you-read; or (4) (as a mid-case) to see which ones you can spot/recall. I read somewhere between the fourth (I was impressed with myself for example for spotting the reference to the “Cat People” short-story but it was a rare triumph) and more of the time the third approach – and would not recommend the first or second – as I think the memes and understanding them is important (see end of my review).
Some – perhaps many - of the references themselves say something deeper I think about the themes that the author is exploring – sometimes in a way which is concisely explored (the book is full of eminently quotable aphorisms) and sometimes in an exercise left for the reader.
One that intrigued me is a lengthy section describing watching a documentary of Thom Yorke singing “Creep” to a festival audience, a section which contains perhaps the second most insightful discussion of that song I have ever seen (the first of course to any member like me of the MTV rather than Twitter generation was by Beavis and Butthead). The narrator describes how Yorke’s almost palpable disgust at how a song which was originally and specifically around alienation/isolation is now hollered back to him by huge crowds of the very type of people that excluded him - suddenly allows him to recapture and re-own that very sense of detachment of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here at the heart of the song. And of course one thinks of how Twitter has changed over time and how the narrator and Lockwood and continually trying to reclaim the original sense of freedom they felt there against their disgust at it being the very thing that permitted and enabled the rise of Trump (called in the book the Dictator).
This first part of the novel is nothing if not bold in its claims to re-address the issue of what literary fiction should be in the 2120s. As per my opening quote the Joycean comparison is explicit – and reinforced by a visit to Dublin. And a trip to Scotland leads the narrator and her husband to sneer at tourists visiting a lighthouse only to realise later that the tourists are paying homage to Virginia Woolf.
Another trip leads her to view an ancient cairn and reflect: “They said all you needed to be remembered was one small stone piled on another,” she thinks to herself. “Wasn’t that what we were doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?”
The second part of the novel gives what seems a very abrupt and very deliberate change of gears. The narrator’s sister is pregnant and the LOL-ing at the baby’s head on its scans suddenly takes a dramatic turn after an urgent message from her mother asking her to fly back to the family home, as Doctors have discovered that the baby is suffering from Proteus syndrome (gigantism as suffered by the elephant man) and will likely not survive – the only real question being if her sister will also survive given Ohio laws which even make it illegal to induce a pregnant woman weeks before term. This leads to agony for her strongly, in fact militantly pro-life father – forced now to “live in the world he has created” (that itself an echo of course of the Twitterati’s dilemma in Trumps America)
.
And then unexpectedly the baby survives and the book takes an even more serious turn.
Of course it is tempting to view the baby as a metaphor – a metaphor for the unexpected survival but also unusual and unprecedented development of Twitter as a medium, for the hyperbole and gigantism of the internet; or alternatively (as the narrator increasingly finds true feelings and depth of emotion in her love for her niece) as a metaphor for the difference between the Portal and IRL. And both of these metaphors are absolutely relevant.
But also as the narrator remarks “It spoke of something deep in human beings how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.” – because this part of the book is given much greater emotional heft when you realise it is the least fictional part and that it is very much about Lockwood’s own experiences and her own niece. This section will I think be seen as emotionally moving by some and emotionally manipulative by others – I was much more in the former camp.
It also of course causes the narrator to examine her use of the Portal: her popular and archly ironical persona there which has given her whatever measure of identity and recognition she has “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”; her realisation that the universal shared experiences of the internet do not match the individual or closely shared nature of personal tragedy “The previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone”; the sudden realisation that the need to participate in a communal consciousness and affirm and even create a shared experience is replaced by the need to participate in her family's personal tragedy "She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed , up until the last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing" but also a recognition that much of what she has learn through Twitter and the shared vocabulary and shortcuts she has established with her sister do enable them to find a way to navigate through and communicate during an impossible situation - “For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for this moment.”
But the strongest parts of this book are those which just examine the miracle of life, the smell of a baby’s head, that celebrate the small battles that her niece wins in a war that she was already destined to lose, even before her birth. And there are some hugely emotional moments - for example a diaper change, the second appearance of a poodle.
There is so much else I could say about this book but I would urge people to engage with it. For anyone with an LRB subscription many ideas in the book were included in a British Museum lecture by the author shortly before lockdown (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n...) a lecture which the narrator also gives towards the end of the book in a nice meta twist.
I first listened to this book in Audiobook form – where it is excellently narrated by Kristen Sieh who captures, I think, the tone of the book perfectly. If I had any criticism it would probably be to drop the accents – particularly the Australian one.
One thing about listening to the Audiobook while say walking your dog (as I did) is that unlike reading a Kindle version, or a paper copy (but with a smartphone by your side) it is not so easy to Google the various references/memes etc and find yourself drawn into your own portal. Normally I would say that is a good thing – I aim (not always successfully) to use literature to escape from the omni-presence of the screen – but here I think this does not allow full identification with the underlying worldview at the centre of the book.
And as for the cheating option – well this link (which I found after I finished helps) https://lithub.com/all-the-memes-in-p... but again I think turns entering the portal into staying on the outside looking in and so does not really work.
My thanks to Bloomsbury UK Audio for an Audiobook ARC via NetGalley
Now fully deserved winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize.
I re-read this book (is it a re-read if the first time was an audio book?) following its deserved shortlisting for 2021 Women's Prize - now joined by a rare double shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize.
I have to say that on a second (or first) read I think the book was even better than the first time
Original review
“Stream-of-consciousness…. Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-¬consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”
From your experience you know Patricia Lockwood to be (tick all the correct answers)
a) Author of the memoir “Priestdaddy” and an highly thoughtful contributor to the London Review of Books
b) Author of the harrrowing viral poem “Rape Joke”
c) Originator of the Twitter concept of ironical sexts (sample: “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter You put your whole head through me”) and author of one of the all time great literary tweets: @parisreview. So is Paris any good or not
All three are true but depending on if your answer was more a/b (or even none of the above) than b/c may depend on how you engage with the first half of this book - a novel in which the the author aims with some success to re-cast cutting edge literary fiction for the world of Twitter, but largely by adopting and reproducing the memes of Twitter.
The first person narrator of the novel is unnamed, but the book is heavily autofictional.
Lockwood has remarked with some profundity that the reason that so much fiction is now autofictional is that Google allows us to discover that it is (whereas previously we would know of author’s lives only what they chose to reveal) – a quote I found out when Googling to see how much of this novel was autofictional.
The narrator has gained fame in the Portal (Lockwood’s term Twitter - not as many reviews seem to claim the entire internet - given that the word “internet” is used at least once in proximity to the Portal) for a single viral tweet: Can a dog be twins?.
Now her life seems to consist of two main parts – sitting on her chair participating in the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal and travelling around the world talking about the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal – and the first part’s plot matches this The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair.
The book is a series of (to quote Lauren Oyler’s narattor in “Fake Account”) “Necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel.” - a style that is familiar now from Jenny Offill (and others) and was parodied (slightly unsuccessfully in my view) in Oyler’s novel but which Lockwood and her narrator defend (with reservations)
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connectoin had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
Many if not most of the sections are about viral tweets and memes, almost all I think taken from 2018, very little of which is actually explained - and I have seen some criticism of this. But then I can think of a book (a book of course referenced in my opening quote) which for full appreciation relies on an encyclopedic knowledge in one City on a single day in 1904 (or tens of pages explaining the references) and that is considered perhaps the greatest novel of all time.
Returning to this novel - for those who haunted the internet that year to the extent of the narrator’s inhabitation of planet Portal (and who are likely the a/b of my introduction) much I think will be very familiar indeed and bring lots of knowing smiles that come when you get or are reminded of a shared in-joke (and so much of this section is about how the Portal is a form of shared consciousness and shared jokes and ideas – and of how difficult it is to convey that sense to future generations or to those not of the Portal).
For those like me who did not – the choices I think are fourfold: (1) to ignore the memes altogether; (2) to cheat; (3) to google-while-you-read; or (4) (as a mid-case) to see which ones you can spot/recall. I read somewhere between the fourth (I was impressed with myself for example for spotting the reference to the “Cat People” short-story but it was a rare triumph) and more of the time the third approach – and would not recommend the first or second – as I think the memes and understanding them is important (see end of my review).
Some – perhaps many - of the references themselves say something deeper I think about the themes that the author is exploring – sometimes in a way which is concisely explored (the book is full of eminently quotable aphorisms) and sometimes in an exercise left for the reader.
One that intrigued me is a lengthy section describing watching a documentary of Thom Yorke singing “Creep” to a festival audience, a section which contains perhaps the second most insightful discussion of that song I have ever seen (the first of course to any member like me of the MTV rather than Twitter generation was by Beavis and Butthead). The narrator describes how Yorke’s almost palpable disgust at how a song which was originally and specifically around alienation/isolation is now hollered back to him by huge crowds of the very type of people that excluded him - suddenly allows him to recapture and re-own that very sense of detachment of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here at the heart of the song. And of course one thinks of how Twitter has changed over time and how the narrator and Lockwood and continually trying to reclaim the original sense of freedom they felt there against their disgust at it being the very thing that permitted and enabled the rise of Trump (called in the book the Dictator).
This first part of the novel is nothing if not bold in its claims to re-address the issue of what literary fiction should be in the 2120s. As per my opening quote the Joycean comparison is explicit – and reinforced by a visit to Dublin. And a trip to Scotland leads the narrator and her husband to sneer at tourists visiting a lighthouse only to realise later that the tourists are paying homage to Virginia Woolf.
Another trip leads her to view an ancient cairn and reflect: “They said all you needed to be remembered was one small stone piled on another,” she thinks to herself. “Wasn’t that what we were doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?”
The second part of the novel gives what seems a very abrupt and very deliberate change of gears. The narrator’s sister is pregnant and the LOL-ing at the baby’s head on its scans suddenly takes a dramatic turn after an urgent message from her mother asking her to fly back to the family home, as Doctors have discovered that the baby is suffering from Proteus syndrome (gigantism as suffered by the elephant man) and will likely not survive – the only real question being if her sister will also survive given Ohio laws which even make it illegal to induce a pregnant woman weeks before term. This leads to agony for her strongly, in fact militantly pro-life father – forced now to “live in the world he has created” (that itself an echo of course of the Twitterati’s dilemma in Trumps America)
.
And then unexpectedly the baby survives and the book takes an even more serious turn.
Of course it is tempting to view the baby as a metaphor – a metaphor for the unexpected survival but also unusual and unprecedented development of Twitter as a medium, for the hyperbole and gigantism of the internet; or alternatively (as the narrator increasingly finds true feelings and depth of emotion in her love for her niece) as a metaphor for the difference between the Portal and IRL. And both of these metaphors are absolutely relevant.
But also as the narrator remarks “It spoke of something deep in human beings how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.” – because this part of the book is given much greater emotional heft when you realise it is the least fictional part and that it is very much about Lockwood’s own experiences and her own niece. This section will I think be seen as emotionally moving by some and emotionally manipulative by others – I was much more in the former camp.
It also of course causes the narrator to examine her use of the Portal: her popular and archly ironical persona there which has given her whatever measure of identity and recognition she has “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”; her realisation that the universal shared experiences of the internet do not match the individual or closely shared nature of personal tragedy “The previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone”; the sudden realisation that the need to participate in a communal consciousness and affirm and even create a shared experience is replaced by the need to participate in her family's personal tragedy "She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed , up until the last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing" but also a recognition that much of what she has learn through Twitter and the shared vocabulary and shortcuts she has established with her sister do enable them to find a way to navigate through and communicate during an impossible situation - “For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for this moment.”
But the strongest parts of this book are those which just examine the miracle of life, the smell of a baby’s head, that celebrate the small battles that her niece wins in a war that she was already destined to lose, even before her birth. And there are some hugely emotional moments - for example a diaper change, the second appearance of a poodle.
There is so much else I could say about this book but I would urge people to engage with it. For anyone with an LRB subscription many ideas in the book were included in a British Museum lecture by the author shortly before lockdown (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n...) a lecture which the narrator also gives towards the end of the book in a nice meta twist.
I first listened to this book in Audiobook form – where it is excellently narrated by Kristen Sieh who captures, I think, the tone of the book perfectly. If I had any criticism it would probably be to drop the accents – particularly the Australian one.
One thing about listening to the Audiobook while say walking your dog (as I did) is that unlike reading a Kindle version, or a paper copy (but with a smartphone by your side) it is not so easy to Google the various references/memes etc and find yourself drawn into your own portal. Normally I would say that is a good thing – I aim (not always successfully) to use literature to escape from the omni-presence of the screen – but here I think this does not allow full identification with the underlying worldview at the centre of the book.
And as for the cheating option – well this link (which I found after I finished helps) https://lithub.com/all-the-memes-in-p... but again I think turns entering the portal into staying on the outside looking in and so does not really work.
My thanks to Bloomsbury UK Audio for an Audiobook ARC via NetGalley
October 15, 2021
Shortlisted for the Womens' Prize for Fiction, 2021.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2021. Ugh.
(If I have to add anymore shortlists or god forbid, wins here, I will lose my mind.)
The unnamed narrator in the first half of the book reminded me of the protagonist from the tv series fleabag. The quirky sense of humour and the sarcastic wit were very charming, but my admiration of the book ends here because the rest of it reeks of enlightened centrism. And I tried really hard to ignore it because all those great reviews insist that this book possesses tremendous substance, but welp.
Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.
Ha, capitalism, it's how the author gets money clearly, because many of us don't and can't relate to this. Maybe it's just my third world spirit though.
There's also a narrative discontinuity between the two halves of the books, it's so easy to imagine that the narrator is actually two different characters. I don't mean to politicize the author's grief, I don't need to, she did it herself. And in such a vague manner that I couldn't connect to the grief or the politics. And frankly, try as I did, for most of the book I couldn't discern what she was trying to say.
“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.
Yeesh. Must be nice to be able to joke about such things. I wouldn't ever know.
And why are we still having the "is the internet good or bad" debate and in such a superficial manner? Stop milking this cow. It's turning out to be like the whole "millennials are destroying 'insert capitalism-propogating, pro-poverty, toxic' industry."
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2021. Ugh.
(If I have to add anymore shortlists or god forbid, wins here, I will lose my mind.)
The unnamed narrator in the first half of the book reminded me of the protagonist from the tv series fleabag. The quirky sense of humour and the sarcastic wit were very charming, but my admiration of the book ends here because the rest of it reeks of enlightened centrism. And I tried really hard to ignore it because all those great reviews insist that this book possesses tremendous substance, but welp.
Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.
Ha, capitalism, it's how the author gets money clearly, because many of us don't and can't relate to this. Maybe it's just my third world spirit though.
There's also a narrative discontinuity between the two halves of the books, it's so easy to imagine that the narrator is actually two different characters. I don't mean to politicize the author's grief, I don't need to, she did it herself. And in such a vague manner that I couldn't connect to the grief or the politics. And frankly, try as I did, for most of the book I couldn't discern what she was trying to say.
“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.
Yeesh. Must be nice to be able to joke about such things. I wouldn't ever know.
And why are we still having the "is the internet good or bad" debate and in such a superficial manner? Stop milking this cow. It's turning out to be like the whole "millennials are destroying 'insert capitalism-propogating, pro-poverty, toxic' industry."
November 14, 2021
no one is talking about this absolutely defied my expectations and made me sob.
i'm less engaged in social media than most people my age, so i was worried that this book wouldn't resonate with me. but it did, because it's so fucking human. it's a social media novel, but it's also so much more.
the first half of the book establishes our main character as a resident of "the portal" of the internet, or twitter, or whatever it is. lockwood perfectly captures the surreal and crushing feeling of existing today; especially within the dark, claustrophobic, disorienting post-2016 US. it often gave me a grim chuckle, because this sense of alienated unreality is way too relatable. my digital copy is full of underlinings. the passages are short, but they all feel fucking true and scary and beautiful.
then the second half comes along, and our main character is swept into a world apart from the portal. she withdraws from the standard social media alienation, and is instead faced with something much bigger. something that no one is talking about. i could relate to the disconnect that comes with occupying a space that isn’t commonly relatable or easy to talk about. and of course, the isolation of pain and grief.
this second half had me absolutely enraptured. i chuckled and cried and had to double-check: is this being classified as fiction?? it's in the realm of reproductive rights, but as soon as that stops being the thing, it becomes a novel about pain and loss, and about cherishing beautiful, precious things for as long as we are able. i'm not even really sure how to talk about this.
one thing i found particularly profound is about the feeling of not having a body when you're immersed in the portal; and that "the comforting thing about movies was that she could watch bodies that were not feeling they were bodies."
and later, lockwood mentions that this transcendence of the dreaded corporeal form (and all its burdens) is also how we often think about heaven:
i really appreciate the subtle cyclicality of this novel. so many small ideas that return later in new contexts.
lockwood's fragmented writing style won't appeal to everyone, but it's so fucking fitting here. and there are some passages i didn't connect with and references that went over my head. but i still enjoyed them. there's a sensation of this book slipping through my fingers. it's somehow ephemeral; but not for want of substance.
sure, maybe this is most salient social media novel we've got as of yet. it is a remarkable encapsulation of how it feels to occupy our post-2016 world. but calling it a twitter novel is selling it short. this book buzzes with the energy of a million painful things.
i'm less engaged in social media than most people my age, so i was worried that this book wouldn't resonate with me. but it did, because it's so fucking human. it's a social media novel, but it's also so much more.
the first half of the book establishes our main character as a resident of "the portal" of the internet, or twitter, or whatever it is. lockwood perfectly captures the surreal and crushing feeling of existing today; especially within the dark, claustrophobic, disorienting post-2016 US. it often gave me a grim chuckle, because this sense of alienated unreality is way too relatable. my digital copy is full of underlinings. the passages are short, but they all feel fucking true and scary and beautiful.
then the second half comes along, and our main character is swept into a world apart from the portal. she withdraws from the standard social media alienation, and is instead faced with something much bigger. something that no one is talking about. i could relate to the disconnect that comes with occupying a space that isn’t commonly relatable or easy to talk about. and of course, the isolation of pain and grief.
this second half had me absolutely enraptured. i chuckled and cried and had to double-check: is this being classified as fiction?? it's in the realm of reproductive rights, but as soon as that stops being the thing, it becomes a novel about pain and loss, and about cherishing beautiful, precious things for as long as we are able. i'm not even really sure how to talk about this.
one thing i found particularly profound is about the feeling of not having a body when you're immersed in the portal; and that "the comforting thing about movies was that she could watch bodies that were not feeling they were bodies."
and later, lockwood mentions that this transcendence of the dreaded corporeal form (and all its burdens) is also how we often think about heaven:
The weather is sunny there. And warm, but we wouldn't feel it the way we do now because we wouldn't be in the form our bodies are in now - no sickness and broken bones. We'd be flying through the warmth more than walking.
i really appreciate the subtle cyclicality of this novel. so many small ideas that return later in new contexts.
lockwood's fragmented writing style won't appeal to everyone, but it's so fucking fitting here. and there are some passages i didn't connect with and references that went over my head. but i still enjoyed them. there's a sensation of this book slipping through my fingers. it's somehow ephemeral; but not for want of substance.
sure, maybe this is most salient social media novel we've got as of yet. it is a remarkable encapsulation of how it feels to occupy our post-2016 world. but calling it a twitter novel is selling it short. this book buzzes with the energy of a million painful things.
September 14, 2021
Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Women's prize 2021
Well this was an underwhelming experience, and call me strange, but the first kaleidoscopic, high-on-sugar, kind of Tumblr feed present spoke much more to me than the second, real life part.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
Part 1 of No One Is Talking About This is less a story than an endless now of a globetrotting influencer, vaguely disturbed by events in the real world. It reminded me a bit of Weather by Jenny Offill, but Patricia Lockwood brings a lot more humor to the table, with ironic statements like:
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not living that deeply.
Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.
Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most.
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes- lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustices. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people they had ancestors, and the , after considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
SHOOT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.
The first boy who had called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse.
But no. No, this is how conspiracy thinking began. This is how you become someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes. She must accept, for now, that the craze for ass-eating had been organic, along with all the rest of it.
It didn't go anywhere, we didn't learn much about our narrator, but it was funny to read, captures the times and I generally enjoyed it as satire that hits just close enough what really are our current times.
Part 2 I found much harder to enjoy, if alone based on the content.
The real world comes crashing in, and the story revolves around grief, with laws and politics suddenly very real and influential instead of memes. This part was designed to generate an emotional impact, to be profound, to say something of the importance of family and real connection instead of the notifications, likes, friends and trending topics of the digital world. But I found the set up rather standard, the characters only victims while they clearly had means, and the whole story rather hard to emotional buy into as someone from a country that pioneered both abortion and euthanasia rights.
I am aware this section is autobiographical to the author, but in the context of the book I felt it didn't glue together with part 1 and the excitement I felt while reading that section, thinking it would turn out in a social commentary on the modern day world, alike to for instance the The Circle.
Shortlisted for the Women's prize 2021
Well this was an underwhelming experience, and call me strange, but the first kaleidoscopic, high-on-sugar, kind of Tumblr feed present spoke much more to me than the second, real life part.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
Part 1 of No One Is Talking About This is less a story than an endless now of a globetrotting influencer, vaguely disturbed by events in the real world. It reminded me a bit of Weather by Jenny Offill, but Patricia Lockwood brings a lot more humor to the table, with ironic statements like:
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not living that deeply.
Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.
Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most.
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes- lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustices. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people they had ancestors, and the , after considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
SHOOT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.
The first boy who had called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse.
But no. No, this is how conspiracy thinking began. This is how you become someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes. She must accept, for now, that the craze for ass-eating had been organic, along with all the rest of it.
It didn't go anywhere, we didn't learn much about our narrator, but it was funny to read, captures the times and I generally enjoyed it as satire that hits just close enough what really are our current times.
Part 2 I found much harder to enjoy, if alone based on the content.
The real world comes crashing in, and the story revolves around grief, with laws and politics suddenly very real and influential instead of memes. This part was designed to generate an emotional impact, to be profound, to say something of the importance of family and real connection instead of the notifications, likes, friends and trending topics of the digital world. But I found the set up rather standard, the characters only victims while they clearly had means, and the whole story rather hard to emotional buy into as someone from a country that pioneered both abortion and euthanasia rights.
I am aware this section is autobiographical to the author, but in the context of the book I felt it didn't glue together with part 1 and the excitement I felt while reading that section, thinking it would turn out in a social commentary on the modern day world, alike to for instance the The Circle.
September 21, 2021
The obvious quip is that everyone is in fact talking about this. I first read this several months ago and recently re-read it again. The first half is clever and I’ll give Lockwood credit for being modern and interesting even if I didn’t like it. The second half is set up to pack an emotional punch, but it just fell flat for me. The autofiction and genre-bending make this worthy of the attention this is getting. I just personally didn’t enjoy it.
December 7, 2020
I'm well aware I'm going to be an outlier on this one, but I'm not deliberately trying to have a contrary take – it just didn't do anything much for me. Feels a few years out of date despite its supposed up-to-the-minuteness; I found the tryhard Weird Twitter humour unfunny and the emotional beats predictable.
Review copy from Edelweiss.
Review copy from Edelweiss.
May 5, 2021
I thought this book was brilliant but as I was reading, I found myself a little dismayed at the way I've heard a lot of people talk about it. So much has been made of the fact that this is a book in "two halves"--the first is an irreverent stream-of-consciousness-style series of pithy observations that mimics the experience of scrolling through Twitter, and the second is much more serious, focusing on a family tragedy. The temptation to explain this division away by describing the first half as Online and the second half as Real Life is understandable, but I think it does a disservice to what Lockwood has actually attempted and achieved here.
I don't think it's about the division of Online/Real Life as much as it is a commentary on the inextricable fusion of the two. The narrator's framework for viewing the world through a heavily Online lens is established in the first half, and then the second half shows that in times of grief and hardship, she's still existing within that same framework even while being forced to participate in "Real Life" with more immediacy than she had been used to. While I certainly agree that this is structurally a book made up of two halves, I thought the second half of the book was such a natural continuation of the first that I really admired how Lockwood managed to achieve such a natural coherence of two completely disparate narratives.
And as an Extremely Online Person myself, I loved how much nuance Lockwood brought to this commentary. I feel like so many books and articles and essays about The Internet fall into one of two traps, either extreme reverence or utter condemnation. The reality is so much more nebulous--The Internet is this bizarre world that we all live in separate to our real lives but an intrinsic part of our real lives and I thought Lockwood captured that beautifully.
This is absolutely not a book that I'd recommend to everyone (frankly if you aren't interested in Online Culture, stay away), but it really struck a chord with me and I admired it so much more than I had expected to.
I don't think it's about the division of Online/Real Life as much as it is a commentary on the inextricable fusion of the two. The narrator's framework for viewing the world through a heavily Online lens is established in the first half, and then the second half shows that in times of grief and hardship, she's still existing within that same framework even while being forced to participate in "Real Life" with more immediacy than she had been used to. While I certainly agree that this is structurally a book made up of two halves, I thought the second half of the book was such a natural continuation of the first that I really admired how Lockwood managed to achieve such a natural coherence of two completely disparate narratives.
And as an Extremely Online Person myself, I loved how much nuance Lockwood brought to this commentary. I feel like so many books and articles and essays about The Internet fall into one of two traps, either extreme reverence or utter condemnation. The reality is so much more nebulous--The Internet is this bizarre world that we all live in separate to our real lives but an intrinsic part of our real lives and I thought Lockwood captured that beautifully.
This is absolutely not a book that I'd recommend to everyone (frankly if you aren't interested in Online Culture, stay away), but it really struck a chord with me and I admired it so much more than I had expected to.
May 12, 2022
Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
My overall verdict
The two sides of Twitter:
The best bit:
no one everyone is talking about this
My overall verdict
The two sides of Twitter:
The best bit:
![Profile Image for ©hrissie ❁ [1st week on campus-somewhat run-down].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1610034740i/49071166._UX200_CR0,20,200,200_.jpg)
April 16, 2022
Is it just me, or should e.v.e.r.y.o.n.e. be Talking About This? Preferably with 'a feeling of clicking completeness'. (Marvellous writing, this.)
Of course, in my very specific case, it took three words, no more than three words: the blurb, summoning me, with this 'urgent, genre-defying book' – yes, please.
Mind you, am I – me,myself,&I – on particularly close terms with the Eternal Scroll? Hardly. It took me that extra embarrassing second to realise that the 'portal' referred to the internet – the mediatic dimension of twenty-first century existence. Also, as further proof, I got more unhealthily excited about this, more emotionally invested in it, when the 'portal's void' got in the picture. Because, clearly, Lockwood's level(s) of disappearance – into the portal – make this book (what to call it?) what it is: a very-Now dip into the imperceptible absurdities of present living that seeks to capture its solid 'somewhere-elseness' – the magma of its 'consciousness'.
A quirky, keen, distinctive female voice that transforms words and sentences; that replicates the fragmentary, erratic, improvisational quality of the portal and re-envisions the literary Fragment.
This is what writing should also be doing. Might surely take some mental recalibration. The style, for one thing, might not be to everyone's taste. Not to mention the humour. (But let's face it, it is downright funny.) The mix of irreverence and delicate beauty, moreover, is brilliantly executed. Can it be a bit much? Certainly. But this book, equally certainly, demands that its readers plunge themselves into its dislocated midst, and experience its vigorous fleetingness – or semi-expire amidst its vaguely psychedelic pages. Whatever works best. But
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read it
4.25 stars - Lockwood's is an important achievement.
All this internet. All this technology. All this screen-scrolling. Can we even begin to understand what it is that it is doing to us?
Of course, in my very specific case, it took three words, no more than three words: the blurb, summoning me, with this 'urgent, genre-defying book' – yes, please.
Mind you, am I – me,myself,&I – on particularly close terms with the Eternal Scroll? Hardly. It took me that extra embarrassing second to realise that the 'portal' referred to the internet – the mediatic dimension of twenty-first century existence. Also, as further proof, I got more unhealthily excited about this, more emotionally invested in it, when the 'portal's void' got in the picture. Because, clearly, Lockwood's level(s) of disappearance – into the portal – make this book (what to call it?) what it is: a very-Now dip into the imperceptible absurdities of present living that seeks to capture its solid 'somewhere-elseness' – the magma of its 'consciousness'.
A quirky, keen, distinctive female voice that transforms words and sentences; that replicates the fragmentary, erratic, improvisational quality of the portal and re-envisions the literary Fragment.
This is what writing should also be doing. Might surely take some mental recalibration. The style, for one thing, might not be to everyone's taste. Not to mention the humour. (But let's face it, it is downright funny.) The mix of irreverence and delicate beauty, moreover, is brilliantly executed. Can it be a bit much? Certainly. But this book, equally certainly, demands that its readers plunge themselves into its dislocated midst, and experience its vigorous fleetingness – or semi-expire amidst its vaguely psychedelic pages. Whatever works best. But
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read it
4.25 stars - Lockwood's is an important achievement.
All this internet. All this technology. All this screen-scrolling. Can we even begin to understand what it is that it is doing to us?
Read
November 2, 2022No one is talking about this, because there is no content here and it is lame.
This is more like reading a half-drunk person’s Twitter feed. Just not all that fascinating…there are just quips and the bare-bones suggestion of character or plot. Nope.
DNF
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This is more like reading a half-drunk person’s Twitter feed. Just not all that fascinating…there are just quips and the bare-bones suggestion of character or plot. Nope.
DNF
My list of Pulitzer hopefuls for 2022 - stop by and vote today!
February 5, 2021
4.5
What a phenomenal reading experience that challenged me and made me a better reader.
I usually take a few days to think about the book before I write my review, but given the way this was written I know that I will be better served writing this now. There is very decidedly a Part 1 and a Part 2 of this book. (It's broken up this way so it's helpful.) Part 1 is very weird (but not in a bad way) until you get used to it and also kind of hilarious and sad. Both parts are written in the same style, however Part 1 is a more rapid fire/stream of consciousness on the state of things prior to COVID. (Culturally, socially and politically.) You know that the narrator is a female, probably in her late 20s/early 30s and that she went viral online. That's about it. There are no character names, no real plot - just musings on things. Smart and observant musings though. I was highlighting like crazy! To be helpful, I thought I would reference some of the themes discussed to aid if you're deciding to pick this up or not.
Topics:
-Our reliance on technology - we are slaves to it and it is rapidly interfering with each generation more and more the younger someone is.
-Trump is never mentioned by name, but referred to as 'The Dictator'. I think that is all you really need to know on that.
-Women's rights and health
-Climate change - we are destroying the Earth and no one cares
Then comes Part 2. Part 2 is intense. I don't want to spoil it, but it's very moving. It's also something that does need to be discussed. I feel like the book kind of calmed down for this portion. The stream of consciousness aspect was still the same, but the pace wasn't as fast. The paragraphs were longer and more emotional. It was very much how any human being going through an intense emotional experience would handle themselves. There is the bliss of life before and then there is the current and the after. Where your eyes are opened and the things that were so important before aren't important anymore.
Overall, this book really helped me grow and look at the many ways a story can be told. I am thrilled to have received this and hope this something you can be open minded enough to try. It's different, but it's very worth it.
Thank you to Riverhead Books and Patricia Lockwood for the gifted finished copy.
Publication Date: 02/16/2021
What a phenomenal reading experience that challenged me and made me a better reader.
I usually take a few days to think about the book before I write my review, but given the way this was written I know that I will be better served writing this now. There is very decidedly a Part 1 and a Part 2 of this book. (It's broken up this way so it's helpful.) Part 1 is very weird (but not in a bad way) until you get used to it and also kind of hilarious and sad. Both parts are written in the same style, however Part 1 is a more rapid fire/stream of consciousness on the state of things prior to COVID. (Culturally, socially and politically.) You know that the narrator is a female, probably in her late 20s/early 30s and that she went viral online. That's about it. There are no character names, no real plot - just musings on things. Smart and observant musings though. I was highlighting like crazy! To be helpful, I thought I would reference some of the themes discussed to aid if you're deciding to pick this up or not.
Topics:
-Our reliance on technology - we are slaves to it and it is rapidly interfering with each generation more and more the younger someone is.
-Trump is never mentioned by name, but referred to as 'The Dictator'. I think that is all you really need to know on that.
-Women's rights and health
-Climate change - we are destroying the Earth and no one cares
Then comes Part 2. Part 2 is intense. I don't want to spoil it, but it's very moving. It's also something that does need to be discussed. I feel like the book kind of calmed down for this portion. The stream of consciousness aspect was still the same, but the pace wasn't as fast. The paragraphs were longer and more emotional. It was very much how any human being going through an intense emotional experience would handle themselves. There is the bliss of life before and then there is the current and the after. Where your eyes are opened and the things that were so important before aren't important anymore.
Overall, this book really helped me grow and look at the many ways a story can be told. I am thrilled to have received this and hope this something you can be open minded enough to try. It's different, but it's very worth it.
Thank you to Riverhead Books and Patricia Lockwood for the gifted finished copy.
Publication Date: 02/16/2021
July 22, 2021
This book is on the Women’s Prize shortlist this year, which is why I read it with Beth, and I am so sad to say that I have no idea what it was about.
I normally DNF books I’m not enjoying and don’t review them here. I think you all know this is rare for me, but I was buddy reading, the second half was supposed to be more grounded than the first, and again, the Women’s Prize.
This does not fit the mold of what I think a story or storytelling is, and I guess that’s the point. I could write for days, but the bottom line is that it wasn’t enjoyable, I could not connect with the main character, and the whole thing went completely over my head.
I normally DNF books I’m not enjoying and don’t review them here. I think you all know this is rare for me, but I was buddy reading, the second half was supposed to be more grounded than the first, and again, the Women’s Prize.
This does not fit the mold of what I think a story or storytelling is, and I guess that’s the point. I could write for days, but the bottom line is that it wasn’t enjoyable, I could not connect with the main character, and the whole thing went completely over my head.
January 10, 2021
I was a huge fan of Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy, a book I have recommended to many people. A couple of years ago, I heard her speak at an event in Dublin with Sally Rooney and thought she was hilarious. So I was eager to get stuck into her debut novel, especially when I heard that it addressed internet culture, a topic she clearly knows a lot about.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the protagonist has achieved fame via a viral post that reads: "Can a dog be twins?". She travels the world on the back of this and other humorous tweets, speaking about the internet (or "the portal" as she refers to it) on panels and at conferences. In the second part, the woman is urged to return to her family home, where her sister is experiencing pregnancy complications.
The first half may test the reader's patience. How much you get out of it probably depends on how internet savvy you are. There are a lot in-jokes and references to popular memes. As an avid Twitter user myself, I found it funny and clever, though perhaps there was a lack of heft to this part of the novel. It's more like a collection of witty observations about social media, such as the sheer absurdity of it all:
Or how the Twitter mob decides on its next victim:
Or how addictive the Internet can become:
Everything changes in the second part. The family heartache that befalls the protagonist gives the story an emotional core. It causes her to reexamine her life. However, while she begins to grasp the insignificance of the internet in the grand scheme of things, silly Twitter jokes are still sent between the narrator and her sister as a way of coping with their situation. It's OK for both worlds to co-exist, Lockwood seems to be saying. Without giving too much away, I found the second half of the story incredibly moving. Lockwood writes so beautifully about the main character's love for her little niece and the world she is so eager for her to experience:
If I do have some slight reservations about the book, it's with the first half. The nature of its fragmented commentary on social media may put some readers off and it's possible the cultural references contained within will date rapidly. But the devastating second half elevates the story into something profound, putting the protagonist's earlier carefree existence and trivial concerns into context. I experienced lots of emotions reading this book: it made me laugh, it brought a tear to my eye, and it made me grateful that we have writers as poetic and incisive as Patricia Lockwood, who can make sense of this modern world and all its madness.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the protagonist has achieved fame via a viral post that reads: "Can a dog be twins?". She travels the world on the back of this and other humorous tweets, speaking about the internet (or "the portal" as she refers to it) on panels and at conferences. In the second part, the woman is urged to return to her family home, where her sister is experiencing pregnancy complications.
The first half may test the reader's patience. How much you get out of it probably depends on how internet savvy you are. There are a lot in-jokes and references to popular memes. As an avid Twitter user myself, I found it funny and clever, though perhaps there was a lack of heft to this part of the novel. It's more like a collection of witty observations about social media, such as the sheer absurdity of it all:
"As she began to type, “Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed."
Or how the Twitter mob decides on its next victim:
"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. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision."
Or how addictive the Internet can become:
"When she was away from it, it was not just like being away from a body, but a warm body that wanted her. The way, when she was gone from it, she thought so longingly of My information. Oh, my answers. Oh, my everything I never knew I needed to know.
Everything changes in the second part. The family heartache that befalls the protagonist gives the story an emotional core. It causes her to reexamine her life. However, while she begins to grasp the insignificance of the internet in the grand scheme of things, silly Twitter jokes are still sent between the narrator and her sister as a way of coping with their situation. It's OK for both worlds to co-exist, Lockwood seems to be saying. Without giving too much away, I found the second half of the story incredibly moving. Lockwood writes so beautifully about the main character's love for her little niece and the world she is so eager for her to experience:
"The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart), hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute."
If I do have some slight reservations about the book, it's with the first half. The nature of its fragmented commentary on social media may put some readers off and it's possible the cultural references contained within will date rapidly. But the devastating second half elevates the story into something profound, putting the protagonist's earlier carefree existence and trivial concerns into context. I experienced lots of emotions reading this book: it made me laugh, it brought a tear to my eye, and it made me grateful that we have writers as poetic and incisive as Patricia Lockwood, who can make sense of this modern world and all its madness.
June 6, 2022
on a scale from 1 to 10, how high do you think Patricia Lockwood was when she wrote that book ? (i'd say a 9 but i'm open to discussion)
November 14, 2020
the great Twitter novel.
August 24, 2023
I loved how unusual this book is. It felt refreshing.
‘When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged 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’
‘When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged 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’
May 5, 2021
Let's start with the fact that this book had a couple of tremendous strengths. Despite those, I can't really say I liked it. While it was thematically interesting and had moments that were truly touching, those strengths were offset by its structure.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, we are introduced to a girl who is really, really into the internet (known as the portal here). She is an influencer (in today's parlance) who rose to fame with a single meme. Her life is effectively lived online. Part I basically illustrates this by re-surfacing a whole bunch of Twitter nostalgia in bite sized chunks. If you were into Twitter in 2017-19, this whole section might be a fun reminiscence. If you weren't (and I wasn't), you basically have little idea of what is being alluded to. Fortunately, you can google it all, and some enterprising person actually compiled a list. But I fail to see how this structure made for a good reading experience. Nor did I feel like I really got a whole lot of insight into our protagonist other than her life was inseparable from the online world. That's an interesting piece of social commentary to ponder actually, but by trying to present it in such a "I'm oh so clever" way, I think it became mostly boring.
Part II was fortunately much better. The protagonist's niece is born, and unfortunately she is has a syndrome (one you will recognize, but I don't want to spoil too much here). She is yanked away from her internet life forced into the real world by this crisis situation. From here, we see a family dealing with the tremendous love of a child, despite her imperfections, and the accompanying grief that derives from her hopeless condition. There are some important moments of truth in this section, and I think anyone who has had a child will really be hard pressed not to shed a tear. However, there are still moments from the portal and bits of pop culture woven into part II, and the structure of very short paragraphs remains . . .and for me, it was merely distracting. As soon as I was feeling something, I was onto the next thing.
This book struck me as one that might be cool to read in college. The author seemed to be saying that online life, which is almost always going in for a laugh or out for a kill, is a distraction from the real world where perfection is not a pre-requisite to love and even the helpless creatures help to underscore our humanity.
Or maybe I was just hoping that's what the author wanted to say.
It's possible she just wanted to juxtapose the comedy of our online existence to the pathos of reality, and to show how fragmented our lives have become with only the most impactful life events pulling us back from the lure of the portal.
The problem is - - I'm really not sure what she meant, whether this book was intended as black comedy, or a salute to internet culture, or an autobiographical tribute for her sister. I have no idea really, and while I salute the creative effort, I can't say I liked where I ended up.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, we are introduced to a girl who is really, really into the internet (known as the portal here). She is an influencer (in today's parlance) who rose to fame with a single meme. Her life is effectively lived online. Part I basically illustrates this by re-surfacing a whole bunch of Twitter nostalgia in bite sized chunks. If you were into Twitter in 2017-19, this whole section might be a fun reminiscence. If you weren't (and I wasn't), you basically have little idea of what is being alluded to. Fortunately, you can google it all, and some enterprising person actually compiled a list. But I fail to see how this structure made for a good reading experience. Nor did I feel like I really got a whole lot of insight into our protagonist other than her life was inseparable from the online world. That's an interesting piece of social commentary to ponder actually, but by trying to present it in such a "I'm oh so clever" way, I think it became mostly boring.
Part II was fortunately much better. The protagonist's niece is born, and unfortunately she is has a syndrome (one you will recognize, but I don't want to spoil too much here). She is yanked away from her internet life forced into the real world by this crisis situation. From here, we see a family dealing with the tremendous love of a child, despite her imperfections, and the accompanying grief that derives from her hopeless condition. There are some important moments of truth in this section, and I think anyone who has had a child will really be hard pressed not to shed a tear. However, there are still moments from the portal and bits of pop culture woven into part II, and the structure of very short paragraphs remains . . .and for me, it was merely distracting. As soon as I was feeling something, I was onto the next thing.
This book struck me as one that might be cool to read in college. The author seemed to be saying that online life, which is almost always going in for a laugh or out for a kill, is a distraction from the real world where perfection is not a pre-requisite to love and even the helpless creatures help to underscore our humanity.
Or maybe I was just hoping that's what the author wanted to say.
It's possible she just wanted to juxtapose the comedy of our online existence to the pathos of reality, and to show how fragmented our lives have become with only the most impactful life events pulling us back from the lure of the portal.
The problem is - - I'm really not sure what she meant, whether this book was intended as black comedy, or a salute to internet culture, or an autobiographical tribute for her sister. I have no idea really, and while I salute the creative effort, I can't say I liked where I ended up.
October 5, 2021
This is clearly a polarizing book. I get it. It’s written in snippets. 210 pages, filled with hundreds of mini snippets, some as short as a few words and some as long as three quarters of a page. Right away, the structure of the book is a turn off for a lot of people. The plot is loosely there, and I would argue that it’s not even the main selling point of the book. Without revealing much, we follow a social media influencer who blew up off of a meme. That’s it. The main reason I would want people to read this is, as it always is for me, emotions. Feelings. What No One Is Talking About This does so well (lord knows how) is capture the jarring and erratic feeling of scrolling down your Twitter feed, double-tapping that high school acquaintance’s third photo of the week on Instagram, or having 15-20 text messages show up every 5 minutes. It’s wild. It’s hazy. It’s blurry. It’s not entirely pleasant. It’s actually not even pleasant at all, but you do it anyway. At the heart of it all, Lockwood does what “the portal” (as she dubs the collective mass of social media) has made us desensitized to: juxtapose pure emotion and unprocessed trauma, the real world, with memes and Gen Z captions.
This one is between a 3 and 4 for me, but I don’t like doing the 0.5 addition, so I will leave it as a flowy, wavey thing in the portal. We can float in between the two. I will come back and read it at a point, so it’s not finding its way to the secondhand store anytime soon. I just have to get used this new style. I will, but it’s just so... different. Holy cow, though. This book is funny.
This one is between a 3 and 4 for me, but I don’t like doing the 0.5 addition, so I will leave it as a flowy, wavey thing in the portal. We can float in between the two. I will come back and read it at a point, so it’s not finding its way to the secondhand store anytime soon. I just have to get used this new style. I will, but it’s just so... different. Holy cow, though. This book is funny.
August 8, 2022
Personally I don't use any social media really and at most I browse websites. This book kind of reminded me why, reading it felt like the same nauseating experience that comes with being chronically online. I really did not enjoy this at all. I had to force myself to finish it. I didn't get much out of and I didn't find it insightful at all to be honest. I think I just wasn't the intended audience for this book. It just felt like even when the book was trying to have depth it fell flat. It felt like those posts you'll see where people say "my therapist point out/said to x to me today" if that makes sense.
April 19, 2021
Come on, publishers of the world , where’s your good taste and imagination? How the hell do you expect anyone to open a book with this “Hallelujah, Jesus is our saviour” kind of cover? This is ridiculous! Are you trying to sell books or boycotting them?!
If it wasn’t for Goodreads and the good taste of friends, I wouldn’t have looked at this book in a million years.
Rant over.
Now let me tell you what this book is about and what I thought of it. But first let me just give you a bit of personal background on how I first realised social media was becoming a thing; the big thing we all came to know so well. So this big revelation, like many other ones, came to me quite late in life, on a day back in 2010 when my sister told me about this massive social media thing called Facebook. “Facebook, really? What is that about?” I asked enthusiastically. “Oh, it’s this website where everyone creates their own page and gets to share all the stuff that matters to them.”, my sister replied quite savvily.
Needless to say that I created my own Facebook page that same day. I was literally over the moon just by imagining how good it would be if we all could start sharing our own “important stuff”: Our cultural and social differences; our personal views; god, even our favourite forms of art.
Well, it turns out, I was quite naive 11 years ago because the thought that we were bound to destroy ourselves instead of improving ourselves never crossed my mind.
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.
So yes, all this to say that this is a novel completely focused on what it means to (obsessively) live online. And like a life spent online, its structure is completely fragmentary. This fragmented approach works perfectly well in this novel. However, on an online basis I believe all the bits and pieces randomly mixed together are a very dangerous combination of knowledge and ignorance, facts and lies.
A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
The things about this very intelligent and highly original novel that are going to stay with me are its completely addictive writing and also its very moving but completely unsentimental ending.
Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained?
If it wasn’t for Goodreads and the good taste of friends, I wouldn’t have looked at this book in a million years.
Rant over.
Now let me tell you what this book is about and what I thought of it. But first let me just give you a bit of personal background on how I first realised social media was becoming a thing; the big thing we all came to know so well. So this big revelation, like many other ones, came to me quite late in life, on a day back in 2010 when my sister told me about this massive social media thing called Facebook. “Facebook, really? What is that about?” I asked enthusiastically. “Oh, it’s this website where everyone creates their own page and gets to share all the stuff that matters to them.”, my sister replied quite savvily.
Needless to say that I created my own Facebook page that same day. I was literally over the moon just by imagining how good it would be if we all could start sharing our own “important stuff”: Our cultural and social differences; our personal views; god, even our favourite forms of art.
Well, it turns out, I was quite naive 11 years ago because the thought that we were bound to destroy ourselves instead of improving ourselves never crossed my mind.
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.
So yes, all this to say that this is a novel completely focused on what it means to (obsessively) live online. And like a life spent online, its structure is completely fragmentary. This fragmented approach works perfectly well in this novel. However, on an online basis I believe all the bits and pieces randomly mixed together are a very dangerous combination of knowledge and ignorance, facts and lies.
A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
The things about this very intelligent and highly original novel that are going to stay with me are its completely addictive writing and also its very moving but completely unsentimental ending.
Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained?
December 10, 2020
2.5 rounded down
Quite saddened to say that this was a huge disappointment. I loved Priestdaddy and enjoyed Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, so had been looking forward to Lockwood's fiction debut. So it's unfortunate that I didn't get much out of this and couldn't really see what the author was trying to achieve with the novel.
The first half of the book is made up of a LOT of "Weird Twitter" humour, which isn't even funny (to this reader) in an ironic or satirical way, and added very little to the plot. The second half of the book goes on to follow the protagonist navigating the world after the birth of her niece, who is born with birth defects. This half of the book is a complete parallel to the first, and is made up of tender moments in her niece's life.
Whilst parts for this resonated with me - particular those in the latter half of the book - it just didn't come together well as a whole. A shame, as I still love Lockwood's writing, but unfortunately No One Is Talking About This just fell flat for this reader.
Thank you Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Quite saddened to say that this was a huge disappointment. I loved Priestdaddy and enjoyed Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, so had been looking forward to Lockwood's fiction debut. So it's unfortunate that I didn't get much out of this and couldn't really see what the author was trying to achieve with the novel.
The first half of the book is made up of a LOT of "Weird Twitter" humour, which isn't even funny (to this reader) in an ironic or satirical way, and added very little to the plot. The second half of the book goes on to follow the protagonist navigating the world after the birth of her niece, who is born with birth defects. This half of the book is a complete parallel to the first, and is made up of tender moments in her niece's life.
Whilst parts for this resonated with me - particular those in the latter half of the book - it just didn't come together well as a whole. A shame, as I still love Lockwood's writing, but unfortunately No One Is Talking About This just fell flat for this reader.
Thank you Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
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