no one is talking about this book review

The protagonist’s feelings about the baby cannot be described in the portal, which loves things like bags of peas “photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities.” How do you tweet about the all-consuming nonverbal intimacy you feel with someone who will likely soon die but right now is learning to have a body? The words and images the protagonist conjures up to communicate this, like Styrofoam cups with holes poked in the bottom that won’t hold water, don’t seem to carry meaning online.

Each has its own criteria for determining what a person should be like, what a life should feel like-criteria that don’t make any sense to the other. No One Is Talking About This stitches together these two contemporary planes of experience-a hospital in Ohio and a small glowing rectangle in the protagonist’s pocket. She falls “heavily out of the broad warm us” of the Internet (called “the portal” in Lockwood’s fictional universe), which recedes into her phone. The protagonist is sucked out of the economy of quips and memes into the tiny pleasures of teaching a kid to experience the sensory, preverbal, offline world. Everyone around the baby falls hopelessly in love with her. No One Is Talking About This takes a sharp turn: intimacy and crisis yank the protagonist offline halfway through the novel, when her sister’s baby is born with a rare disorder that gives her divergent perception and cognition.

Lockwood might be the first person who has made me feel less bad by writing about the Internet. The first hundred pages of No One Is Talking About This discuss what many books are talking about: living with social media. The protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s new novel seems like the kind of person I love to hate: she’s known for knowing what’s going on in the Internet social world, so much so that she’s paid to give talks about how it feels to be very online. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

No one is talking about this book review