Status
Call number
Genres
Publication
Description
"From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), 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"--… (more)
User reviews
"chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what"
"An episode of 'True Life' about a girl who liked to roll herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually."
"...which coffeemakers were but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ."
"She had become famous for a post that said simply, "Can a dog be twins?" That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the state of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember "Can a dog be twins?" instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let's face it, she didn't know either."
Imagine reading over 100 pages of similar drivel, with plenty of sophomoric butt, nipple and dildo humor mixed in. I nearly quit reading the book 50 pages in, but I read several reviews that encouraged me to continue, as the second half was said to be much better.
I held my nose and skimmed through the next 50 pages before reading the second part, in which the social influencer learns that her sister is carrying a child who appears to have a serious genetic disorder. Unfortunately Lockwood trivializes the grief that a mother and family experience when they learn that a yet to be born baby has a life altering and potentially fatal condition, the hope that the doctors were wrong and the baby will be normal, and the torturously slow process of watching the child's slow and inevitable decline towards a painful death. I occasionally care for children such as these in the hospital, and I was deeply offended by Lockwood's insensitive handling of this process, especially since her own sister had a child with the same fatal genetic condition. The last straw for me was the uproarious laughter by several family members just before the baby's funeral, which I found infuriating and deeply insulting.
I would hope that Ms Lockwood obtained her sister's permission to "craft" a novel about her late child and family, but even if she did I thought that this was incredibly vulgar, cruel and distasteful, and the attempt to meld these two themes didn't work for me at all. This is a "love it or hate it" book, and I fall firmly in the latter category, as this sorry excuse for a novel is a perfect example of why I don't like modern American literature, with few exceptions.
As the unnamed protagonist in this book displays, the internet can become all too consuming and drag one into a bottomless pit of opinions and positions.
The book is written as if it were a bunch of tweets and for that reason maybe readers who are apart of the twitter family will find it cohesive and understandable. Others, like myself, who have never found the point of short unexplained tweets will find this book annoying.
From there, the narrator's IRL family navigates a terrible crisis, and Lockwood continues to balance the Always Online With Little Attention Span tone as her protagonist tries to make sense of this. If you've been on Twitter for a while you will likely recognize some of the memes and political scandals that she references; if not, it might be an alien world to try to understand. Either way, I think it provided helpful reflections on living in 2022 where our IRL and online selves can easily cleave into two.
But oh is there a turn, and Lockwood delivers a heart-felt tale that will catch in your throat at the end.
Lockwood wrote the funny,
Like many other reviewers, I initially found this quite vapid (yesterday my friend ran me through the plot of the Lucinda Riley series she's working her way through, to which I responded "I'm reading a novel in which a woman goes on Twitter a lot") - but the second half, the part with the real-life family tragedy, unfolds very sadly and with a strange beauty. A few of my co-reviewers seem to find her treatment of it flippant, offensive - to which I counter, that the author doesn't make dumb jokes about dead babies to make light of the situation or anyone's suffering. This is who she is, a person in this place and time, this is how she communicates, and these are the words that come out of her when faced with tremendous sadness. It's not good or bad, it just is - and that's kind of the whole point, really.
This book will definitely not be for everyone - but as a novel of how grief is experienced through the lens of late-2010s internet culture - like a cat gif with the fake weeping eyes, it has a strange, sad charm.
Patricia Lockwood has been praised for her poetry, “No One Is Talking About This” is her debut novel which I’d call rather experimental in its quite unique style. The book is broken in two parts, the first dealing with the unnamed narrator’s virtual life, the second when she has to come down to earth and face problems of the real world.
The narrator feels detached from her body which has become a mere shell and only serves as a projection screen for her online self. She is aware of the number of her followers and deduces her importance from it. Today’s influencers are so far form reality that the protagonist does not seem to be exaggerated since they all are so over the top that they have lost all credibility and humanness. Lockwood cleverly reveals online mechanisms we all have already fallen prey to: looking up something, digging deeper, roaming from one website to the next, from one forum to another, just to end up in a kind of conspiracy bubble.
“One day it would all make sense! One day it would all make sense – like Watergate, about which she knew noting and also did not care. Something about a hotel.”
Yes, she is totally superficial and stupid and cannot survive a single day without her cell phone. It needs a major blast to take her back into something like a real life. And quite unexpectedly, her values shift, her focus moves from her fictional online self to real humans.
It’s the novel of the moment, reminding us that there is more than the next tweet or Instagram post. The protagonist is wonderfully created and showing her ability to open her eyes and change perspective also provides some hope in those chaotic times.
The novel is divided into two parts that differ quite a bit in tone and mood, if not in writing style. In the first part, we meet the unnamed protagonist as she goes about her days as an internet star for the quirky observations she has posted (e.g. “Can a dog be twins?”). She exists almost entirely in her virtual world, all but ignoring the husband, family, and friends that anchor her real life. This situation changes abruptly in the second part of the book after she learns that the baby girl her pregnant sister is carrying has Proteus syndrome (an extremely rare genetic disorder resulting in bone and muscle overgrowth) and will almost certainly die at a very young age. Deeply moved, the protagonist disconnects from the portal and spends the six months of the baby’s life fully engaged in the daily routine of loving and caring for her niece. She eventually returns to her previous virtual life, but as a woman whose perspective has changed for good.
I had a decidedly mixed reaction to this novel. I did find myself very moved by the heart-wrenching and courageous tale of the afflicted child and her impact on the lives of everyone she contacted. As revealed in the Acknowledgments, this part of the story is based on the real-life experience of the author’s own sister and brother-in-law, which makes the force of the words and images that much more powerful. In contrast, the entire first half was entirely forgettable; written in short, mannered paragraphs reminiscent of Twitter feeds, the section appeared to be more about developing an idiosyncratic style than a meaningful message. In fact, I am not sure what original insights about life in the portal are gained and it does nothing to prepare the reader for the jarring transition to come. So, while I certainly appreciated the author’s passion and creativity in telling this story, it was not a wholly successful reading experience for me.
And then, about mid-point
This may be a book to own. And to pick up again and again.
The first time I attempted to read this book, I couldn’t follow Lockwood’s disjointed commentary about many disparate issues. Although I could figure out what most of the allusions referred to, I wasn’t sure there was any inherent value to continuing to read. But, after reading several reviews and noting that The New York Times named No One is Talking About This as one of the best books of 2021 and realizing it was nominated for a Booker Prize, I went back to it. This time it was so much more engaging –especially the second part.
Since I just finished facilitating a discussion group about millennial authors. I looked up Lockwood’s age, and since she was born in 1981, she is a millennial, and the writing reflects many of the attributes of other works written by her age group:
How global capitalism affects an individual and a desire to hate it
Derision for haters
Thorny issues related to money and class
Social media and digital communication everywhere
Satire, sometimes very dark
Being influenced and influencing others
Rootless, anxious life
Some quotes from the book that I noted include:
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
(p. 4). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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.
(p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice.
(p. 33). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??
(p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Old age is this. So much seemed banal, things that have been said so much before.
Hard to tell if narrator understands why it is so important to change the words and the thinking behind racism, etc.
Does theme of the "dictator" minimize/mistake
I was surprised at the background presented -- the organized religion, the privileged family.
The final section brought mixed emotions. Anger at the external forces, anger at the privilege, anger at the sentimentality. Sympathy and sorry but cynicism too.
Lack of human connection? I couldn't really tell. It is easy to be jealous.
I picked this book up because it is longlisted for the
Part One is written in a series of short paragraphs, which are occasionally connected to each other by a common thread, but more often can be read as standalone comments. They appear to be taken from online conversations. I got the gist of what the author is trying to say – how we are becoming addicted to the portal, which is warping the way we think; however, it is not a particularly enjoyable reading experience, almost like reading a series of non-sequiturs.
Part Two is much more to my liking, as the paragraphs are now more related to each other and tell a story about the protagonist’s sister finding out about a fetal birth defect. It offers social commentary on several contemporary social issues. It creatively references politics, current events, and internet memes.
The book will likely appeal most to those who enjoy experimental fiction. These types of books are “hit or miss” with me. Thanks to Part Two, this book was more “hit” than “miss,” and I am glad to have read it.
The main difference is that NOITAT is peripatetic, both physically and psychologically. She is on a book tour for the first half, which dovetails with the mental state of being very online, of processing the world through the portal (as she calls it).
Edited to add: It's a novel! My entire perception of this book was skewed by the afterword - recency bias, I guess. But there is so much Plathesque overlap with "real" life that it changes your understanding of the plot.
This part was seriously boring, even though the
The second part focuses on the "real life" events that are in complete contrast with the beginning of this book. It deals with some heavy topics, politics, law, grief... It was a lot more interesting and better written, but it never took off. The chopped-up structure didn't help.
As a result, although I really felt some parts, I couldn't really connect to this as a whole.
I wish I loved this more. I wish the second half started sooner in this book and that I could get into the mind of the narrator more.
But, as it is, it was very underwhelming.