Issue #1: Book Review: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
I first heard of Patricia Lockwood and her new book on The Blindboy Podcast. The host spoke effusively about the book, describing it as bursting in imagination and creativity....
I first heard of Patricia Lockwood and her new book on The Blindboy Podcast. The host spoke effusively about the book, describing it as bursting in imagination and creativity. That piqued my interest, and I got myself a copy.
No One Is Talking About This is a novel written in a very unusual style. I likened reading it to reading a chaotic Twitter timeline with wild tweets. I didn’t quite get what the author set out to do in the book until I found one of her popular articles on the internet. In How Do We Write Now?, she wrote:
The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.
English will come out of it wrong, and then English will come wrong out of me.
The article reflects on the poisoning of the mind brought about by years of excessive exposure to the internet and her efforts at ridding herself of the internet’s toxins. After I read it, the novel started making sense to me.
No One Is Talking About This is a two-part novel that follows a nameless protagonist, whom I refer to as Karen (don’t ask me why). The two parts very much feel like two different novels. The first part is humorous, and the author wrote it in a Twitter-feed style with staccato sections, as if it was written by someone dealing with the effects of internet poisoning. It felt like I was reading thoughts from various people spliced together.
A striking part of the book’s first part is how the nameless protagonist described the feeling of longing for the internet when she was away from it. It was a feeling of FOMO, which I am sure you feel regularly:
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.
The second part of the novel is less boisterous than the first, as Karen had to deal with a difficult situation with her family. I don’t want to spoil the book, but it involves a rare genetic condition called Proteus syndrome. Genetic disorders are challenging for the people that have them, and I hope we get to a place where we can use gene-editing technology to cure these diseases.
All told, I think it is a decent novel. If you end up reading it, please let me know what you think about it.