A very online woman, unnamed, microfamous for the sentence “Can a dog be twins?,” is revealed to the reader through the vast landscape of her internet presence, the hills and valleys she traverses, the strange characters she meets along the way. The novel takes shape in the parenthetical scoop of a Venn diagram between machine and mind, crowd and solitude, joke and beauty. These halves are as discrete as a clunky little screen glowing its gloamish light into an open face, two limitless modes that find their limit only where they merge. The second half is about having a body in a world. The second half unfolds in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. If these pique your interest, it's a good sign you might really love this book.THE FIRST HALF of Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This opens in a place between life and death. "Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it." They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. "The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. "Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate." In my case, there were so many times when I felt tempted to highlight whole pages instead of a line - it was that hard to narrow down the best quotes.
Obviously, an author's writing style is even more subjective than analyzing a book's plot or characters - it either moves you or doesn't. The writing style in "No One Is Talking About This" is very poetic, which makes sense, considering Patricia Lockwood is a poet, best known for her viral 2013 poem " Rape Joke" and poetry books " Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals" and " Balloon Pop Outlaw Black." The writing had me highlighting my favorite quotes on almost every page. (P.S.: What is it like to be free?)īut if you've ever deleted Instagram for a week, felt so much happier, and vowed to never go back, only to reinstall it a week later to keep up with your friends, this will probably hit you hard.Ģ. I'll be honest: If you've never woken up and instantly opened your phone to a deluge of cynical political tweets sandwiched between Corgi memes, you might not get this book. She is insightful and sensitive while also unable to resist the ego-inflating pull of catering to online fans. She partakes in posting on social media while questioning her participation in a culture that seems to make the world a lot worse.
To anyone who regularly scrolls through Twitter, this will, ahem, feel frighteningly familiar.īeyond making the protagonist's obsession with "the portal" immediately relatable, it also helps you understand and sympathize with her. The novel is written in snippets that range from a sentence or two to a few paragraphs, often jumping from topic to topic. The structure perfectly mirrors the chaos of being too online.
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