Patricia Lockwood’s no one is talking about this will inevitably be read by people who are already talking about this

Last December, while performing a post-mortem of my recent boyfriend with some friends, I unexpectedly fulfilled a lifelong goal: going seriously viral on Twitter (I am now at 130 thousand likes, thank you very much). The tweet – populist satire about breakups – now reads as trite, and more than a little too bitter. When the tweet first began to gain momentum, my friends and I had taken turns holding my phone as infinite, electrifying notifications buzzed in. I had scrolled through the various white women replies, ‘CRYING UR SO FUNNY,’ and the inevitable, ‘why is no one talking about this!’ In the thrall of five-second celebrity and emotional validation, I felt as though I had finally reached the ceiling of the cloud, where the prophets of our time talked and laughed and laughed and talked. ‘Ahahahha,’ one reply read – which is, as Patricia Lockwood’s protagonist points out, the “new and funnier way to laugh.” Her 2021 debut work of fiction, though, is content with all parts of our cloud, high and low. In no one is talking about this, Lockwood floats through the themes and memes of fascism, sex, postmodernism, womanhood, and being extremely on the internet. You know, the usual.

no one is talking about this was declared one of the top 10 books of 2021 by The New York Times. It was widely reviewed as a messianic, defining ‘book of the internet,’ joining the ranks of the memoir Trick Mirror by fellow essayist and cultural critic Jia Tolentino (who writes no one is talking about this’ blurb alongside Sally Rooney. Can you tell? That this book is RELEVANT to our DAY and AGE?). Lockwood herself is an acclaimed essayist for the London Review of Books, and much more admirable, she is also a poet and Twitter native. The last three years have been prolific for discourse about the internet, and Lockwood is brutally aware of all the poems, think pieces, tweets, video essays, and podcasts that are, in fact, talking about this: “and we always called it that: a piece, a piece, a piece,” she laments about the fragments of commentary littering the stratosphere, “did you read the piece?”

no one is talking about this is a self-conscious, acerbic addition to the theory of the internet. It follows a woman’s peregrinations around the world as a famous internet personality, where like Lockwood, the unnamed protagonist discusses what it Means to be Alive Right Now. The woman’s life both is, and is infiltrated by the internet – which is accurately if rather unimaginatively called, ‘the portal.’ Her claim to viral fame (not as erudite as my bitter breakup tweet) is that she controversially sets forth the great question of our time, “Can a dog be twins?” This premise is charming, absurd, and just the right amount of meta-ironic to get across her point about the irreverence of virality. The book is divided into two parts, with the second half carrying the bulk of the conventional plot. It is almost like reading two completely different books in one.

Part one of no one is talking about this does not try to do much more than bravely ask, ‘what if all my tweets could be paraphrased into literature?’ And this is funny! For a while. Written in short paragraphs – generally no longer than four or five sentences – Lockwood provides interesting (although not entirely coherent) apercus about the portal and its people. She writes the kinds of paragraphs that inspired annotations like, ‘same!’, jokes which I felt compelled to tweet with laughing emojis, and sound-bites I have carefully preserved for future Instagram captions: “He lit a cigarette…to be funny,” and I nodded, or “can’t learn? she googled late at night. can’t learn since losing my virginity?” and I let out a snort. These careful observations culminating into jokes could only have been crafted by someone who has been on the internet for quite some time, and has paid close attention to its ever-changing tides. But as a reader who has also been on the internet for quite some time, they get tiring. An aestheticized rendering of a once-popular GIF is not exactly groundbreaking to the generation that beat the GIF to its comedic death. Some references feel dated, and heavy-handed: “Had she committed a Brexit? It was so easy, these days, to accidentally commit a Brexit.” But then perhaps the immediate-datedness of every tissue of the portal is part of the point. And perhaps I am not Lockwood’s target audience.

In its second half, the beating heart of the book, the protagonist’s sister gives birth to a child with terminal defects; grief and heartbreak are treated with seriousness, confusion, and hopelessness. The child and her family know she will not survive, and the delicate funereal march is regarded with “a kind of absolutism that was almost joy.” During these moments, glossy existentialism is given a breather, and Lockwood ruminates on the complicated relationships between meaning, dystopia, technology, and shattered emotions. For many, this second half resuscitates no one is talking about this from being merely jumbled jargon, and here it earns a kind of elegance. This is undeniable. Lockwood forces her protagonist (and many of her readers) to confront the problem: “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”

However, what ultimately undermines no one is talking about this is that it never convincingly wages an answer to that question, least of all through its politics. “Every fibre in her being was strained. She was trying to hate the police,” Lockwood comments wittily on useless white guilt and the pressure to feel the personal in the political. Unfortunately, her writing suffers from the liberal panic of the Trump era, where pornified descriptions of fascism abound, and the revolution becomes little more than a cool outfit. Quite literally, her protagonist notes, “We were being radicalized, and how did that feel? Like we had just stepped into a Girl Scouts uniform made of fire.” Like everything in this novel, politics are dried in the desert heat of irony. But it is difficult to ignore the incessant, reductive references to an unnamed but obvious dictator who “like all fascists, he was secretly submissive,” when we are directly told, “Sex ended in America on November 8, 2016.”  Lockwood enmeshes sex into the stakes of modern society in that easy internet way. As a result, the book cannot be taken seriously – even though underneath all those layers of self-referential casualness, it feels earnest. About the way the infrastructure of the internet shapes discourse, Lockwood asks (as she has done in essays and lectures previously) “Why were we all writing like this now?… because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.” Yet in most critical interrogations of how the medium affects the message (thank you Mr LcLuhan), Lockwood’s tentative and ‘startling’ conclusion is generally well-accepted and commonsensical. But then perhaps scholars of internet technology are not Lockwood’s intended audience.

Who exactly is, then? And what does it have to offer to us unfortunate internet people? The former question eludes me still – perhaps the target is cultural critics of faraway columns. But on the latter, I believe it offers that which my tweet offered myself. Brief, honest, hilarious moments of identification and collective existence, that flatten upon further reflection, but entertain nonetheless. Lockwood recognizes the fractured reality of life invaded by the internet, swept up in surreal situations, uncertain, and ill-prepared to make sense of it all. There is one paragraph I keep coming back to, one that reads the worst and feels the truest: “Saw my daughter’s tits on the ultrasound. Looked pretty good! And I was like, Damn dude, really? And he just gazed far off into the distance and said, I don’t know how to act. I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore.” no one is talking about this does not know quite how to be a novel, be theory, be sad, and be funny all at the same time. But maybe that’s okay. Who does?