Late in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, a novel about being “extremely online,” a trainer explains that in order to be certified as a service dog, “the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and ignore it.” It’s hard to miss the demoralizing parallel: We are the dog, the greasy bucket is the internet, and we just can’t help ourselves. We’re gluttons for distraction, wherever it may lead. “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew,” Lockwood writes, “and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
Lockwood and her third-person narrator are niche internet celebrities, the former for tweeting, “So is Paris any good or not” at the Paris Review and for a viral poem called “Rape Joke,” the latter for a sublimely dumb tweet: “Can a dog be twins?” Lockwood is also the author of a memoir, Priestdaddy, about growing up with a Catholic priest for a father. Her narrator is invited to speak or sit on panels about the “new communication,” and she gamely does so despite seeming more skeptical of it than her audiences are.
“Every day their attention must turn,” Lockwood writes, “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.” She returns repeatedly to the online sphere’s punitive character, its multiplying rules (“Were we just never to say that someone ‘inclined her head like a geisha’ ever again?”) and pious debates (“whether you could say the word retard on a podcast”) inflicted on us by the virtual heirs to the hall monitor and the tattletale. But Lockwood’s novel is neither an indictment of social media nor an encomium to it but something uneasily in between. Its tone is fascinated, almost disbelieving, and occasionally concerned.
No One Is Talking About This isn’t, in fact, really even a novel in the usual sense. It’s fragmentary, after a prevailing fashion, one uniquely suited to our heavily mediated existence. It won’t escape comparisons to Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson, though it’s more fun than either of them. At first, the reader may think, "I, too, could empty my Notes app into a Word document." But there is an inventive—linguistically and otherwise—intelligence at work here, and it commands our undivided attention. Lockwood is a sponge for the wunderkammer-meets-circus sideshow energy that the internet supplies. Her curiosity is curatorial, even connoisseurial. Best of all, she’s got a keen, very weird sense of humor. This is broad Menippean satire lurking beneath a nauseating crust of animated GIFs, Wojak memes, and @dril tweets.
The way in which the internet’s social culture shapes language and humor is one of Lockwood’s major subjects. The crude orthography, archly idiotic slang, and neo-Dadaist MacPaint aesthetic of most online communication Lockwood terms “the new shared sense of humor.” Seeing it put in these terms is grating. It’s shared, all right—who doesn’t love seeing 300 people in a row Mad Lib the same joke format?—but it hasn’t felt new in some time. “Already it was impossible to explain these things,” Lockwood writes of the short shelf life of memes and jokes, as though fads and ephemera didn’t predate the internet, as if impermanence were a special burden of the extremely online. It’s not that it’s hard to explain these things. Explaining them is easy. The hard part is explaining why you wasted so much time on them.
Not to be a killjoy, but it does become painfully clear in No One Is Talking About This that beneath the studied nihilism and resigned absurdism of much internet discourse is a belief that things are not as they were “supposed” to be. We’re in a simulation. We’re in the wrong timeline. Everything is unprecedented, surreal, and Lockwood’s odd incidental details, such as a woman getting her feet exfoliated by fish or a character who shouts, “Because she classy!” while picking out a fancy casket for a dead infant, bolster that suspicion. “What, in place of [weird tweets], marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.”
This suspicion is intuitive but false. Life has always been this unruly and strange. Just because we had an orange president for four years doesn’t mean our lives aren’t objectively less chaotic and frightening than the lives of millions of people around the world. Life only seems more surreal than ever because, before the internet had invaded every corner of it, life in its variety was more opaque to us. By the time Lockwood asks, “What did we have a right to expect from this life? . . . What had the politicians promised us?” the reader begins to wonder how many internet casualties realize that they bear some responsibility for “the way we live now.” Life doesn’t just happen to us, after all.
But life does happen, unexpectedly and tragically, to our narrator. If the first half of the book is the image in a fun house mirror, dark and distorted and frankly kinda dumb, the second half is the “meatspace,” with its danger, its turbulent emotions, its inescapable biological parameters. The second half belongs to the narrator’s sister, her complicated pregnancy, her baby’s profound congenital abnormalities. “Look how big her head is lol,” this sister says of a 20-week ultrasound, and this is outer space-black foreshadowing, for that head is just going to keep growing and growing, Elephant Man-style.
It is here that Lockwood’s cabinet of riffs and jokes and pics and clips—“pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner”—coalesces into a mature and heartbreaking exploration of how we experience and process “IRL.” Here, there are painful insights (“she could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke”) and gorgeous writing (“the I persisted, a line of light under a locked door”). Lockwood examines not only the limitations of ironic distancing, as we’d expect internet satire to do, but also the undeniable value of it, the way that it’s been integrated irreversibly into our psychological armature.
Like it or not, the internet, “the portal,” as Lockwood calls it, is real, and it’s here to stay. But it will never replace IRL, nor will it, in the end, make IRL all that much easier to bear. This is the truth, and Lockwood presents it, like “a new species of tree frog” that has gone viral, as “covered in warts” but, somehow, very beautiful nevertheless.