Didn't really hit the spot.

I meant to read this ages ago and forgot about it. Saw it in my book collection and thought I better get around to it now or risk it feeling super outdated by the time I read it. Luckily, I think I got to it in time.

I just didn't like it so much though. The second half of the book was significantly better than the first. If I was rating the second half alone, I'd have to go for a more 3/4 star rating. It was beautiful, and really pinpointed a lot of abstract feelings.

The first half was a real let down though. I understand the point of wanting to introduce the reader to the weird chronically online landscape that's the focus of the book. But it was just so long with so little substance. It could have done with a lot of trimming. Specifically, a lot of the meme culture references could have been cut, because they really didn't add much after a while. ( )

I remember there being lots of buzz about [b:No One Is Talking About This|53733106|No One Is Talking About This|Patricia Lockwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601474686l/53733106._SY75_.jpg|84057345] when it came out in 2021. I generally prefer to read literary fiction that provokes a lot of online discourse a few years afterwards, when I happen to spot it on the library shelf. In this case, [b:No One Is Talking About This|53733106|No One Is Talking About This|Patricia Lockwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601474686l/53733106._SY75_.jpg|84057345] is actually about online discourse. It is so entirely of its moment (the Trump presidency before covid) that reading it makes that time seem long ago. Of course that's partially because covid and being constantly online have apparently warped everyone's sense of time. In any case, the novel is narrated by a woman whose career is based on being Very Online. She makes viral posts on the Portal (obviously twitter) and gives talks about society/culture/technology on the strength of this. Lockwood has caught the febrile tone of pre-X twitter discourse very neatly:

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. As if they were a species that released puffs of poison, or black ink in a cloud on the ocean floor. I mean, have you read that article about octopus intelligence? Have you read how octopuses are marching out of the sea and onto dry land, in slick and obedient armies?

These days I gather (from a distance as I deleted my account) that twitter only ever has one main character, the World's Most Divorced Man who owns it. The predominant social media of 2023 seems to be tiktok and that has an algorithm which encourages fragmentation rather than ubiquity. Or so I gather from an email newsletter, as I hate short videos and am no longer willing to keep up with this shit directly.

The first half of [b:No One Is Talking About This|53733106|No One Is Talking About This|Patricia Lockwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601474686l/53733106._SY75_.jpg|84057345] consists of such reflections on being Very Online and what that means for the protagonist's life and emotions. These are tragi-comic, but didn't have great impact for me. In the second half of the book, the protagonist's sister has a baby who is severely disabled and the family takes care of her. I found this latter section moving and very well-observed. The contrast with what preceded it certainly makes the the point that consuming viral internet content does not prepare you for a genuine personal crisis. Lockwood's narrative is deliberately fragmentary, presumably to emulate social media, which reminded me of the cut-up structure of [b:Weather|37506228|Weather|Jenny Offill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566942482l/37506228._SY75_.jpg|59116540]. Her points about our emotional relationships with social media and smart phones are delivered elliptically and with irony. Definitely a novel that captures a specific couple of years in America vividly, although I'm not sure it has a lot to say about technology more generally. ( )

DNF ~25%? The writing style was very painfully not-for-me. Very stream of consciousness and vague. The influencer-style language was also too cringey for me. I'm sure it was going to have a very poignant message about how social media affects our lives, but I'm not into it.

This is a messy book. The first half is written in snippets, vignettes referring to random online phenomena, viral tweets and memes in a sort of stream of consciousness kinda way. It's about people who live online and that is most of their reality.

This part was seriously boring, even though the author can clearly write well, and there is an occasional great paragraph. I just know too many women who write similar things in a similar manner and are much better at connecting emotionally to the reader, so this left me cold.

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. ( )

It's easier for me to respect than love a novel written in the fragmentary style, to say "Yes, I see what you did there, well done, it's not really for me, though". No One Is Talking About This at least has a formal reason for being written this way, even arguably a necessary one, being about the experience of being extremely online, but even more specifically being extremely online on Twitter, or "the portal" as Lockwood's narrator calls it, and this is how the portal writes. It is also however about the experience of having the ultimately inescapable reality of human bodies and sickness suddenly jerk you out of your previous life, even when that life is the disembodied mind inside the portal, and seeing that life continue on in its great stream while you are busy with something else, and when you lift your head and look over at it, you realize that you are now an outsider viewing it through a film of difference and alienation rather than an integrated participant.

Why be a part of the portal in the first place? Why, when what goes on in it, your contributions in it, fly by and are gone in nearly a blink. "Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to 'chug it with her ass.' Already it was impossible to explain these things."

Personally I have no idea why people on Twitter photoshopped bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities or posted OH YES HUNNY to pictures of Stalin, but if even core participants have trouble explaining why they did it a short time later, it can't be very important, really. And so I think it's not important if readers of this novel know the memes Lockwood is referencing or not. It might be a fun sort of parlor game, but that's all.

The important thing to know is why the character is immersing herself into the portal, and what it is doing to her, rather than the frankly irrelevant details of what flies by in the portal. She says, "it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals... she knew how it all turned out... she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day."

So we get a hint that the portal offers self-esteem and a sense of belonging to a favored tribe, psychological benefits that humans seem designed to chase. It offers certainty and a way to avoid the scary unknown. It also becomes a self-erasing addiction. "You have a totally dead look on your face," her husband tells her as she's doing something or other in the portal. She thinks, "Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone." And it takes on a darker cast over time. People - Russians, capitalists, our own ambitious political leaders - exploit it to manipulate us. There's a lust to find transgressors and righteously hound and shun them: "Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?"

"Something has gone wrong," her mother texts her. But she's not referencing the portal. The character's sister has had a terrible revelation about her pregnancy. A rare and fatal genetic abnormality in the baby has been discovered. Her sister's life is in danger. She is suddenly and without warning jerked out of her previous life, undone by the reality of these fragile bodies we inhabit outside of the portal. Lockwood writes,

She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain-wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?

She finds that being surrounded by and participating in her family's pain rather than living so greatly inside the portal reintroduces her to herself: "the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone." As ever, illness and death have a great way of shifting one's perception of the world, one does not have to be extremely online to experience this fact of life, it's just one more way of being that has to bow before something greater. New, but ultimately not different in this respect, anyone can identify with this passage where the character looks at her previous life, before the Great Encounter:

Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.

So the novel takes a turn towards the universal as Life asserts itself over life. It's not sentimental, Lockwood is far too strong of a writer to get trapped in clichés and sentiment only, rather we see the characters doing the best they can to live out love with each other and in the baby's short life among the difficulties and realities that lie in wait. The character wonders if this experience will change her, fill her with more love and kindness towards her fellow humans. On an airplane, she feels the world calling her back, and the rainbow that follows the plane's path just might offer an answer.

Love to you, whether you find yourself in the portal or elsewhere. ( )