Name: Saffia's review of No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Item: No One Is Talking About This
Rating: 0.5
Author: Saffia

Patricia Lockwood

"I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet." --Sally Rooney "A furiously original novel." --Jia Tolentino 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. Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

A Novel

No One Is Talking About This

A woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. When existential threats 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?"

No One Is Talking about This

Nadya

They spoke of the brain's enormous plasticity. Yes, she felt that, she held it in her hand. She remembered pressing warm Silly Putty against newspaper until it picked up a whole paragraph of what was happening, clear enough to read. Then folding and folding it to blankness again.

Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.

Why not, she thought, and began to read the baby Marlon Brando's Wikipedia entry. Maybe it was the champagne, but it suddenly struck her as a democratic principle, that everyone should get to know about Marlon Brando: how he looked like a wet knife in a T-shirt, the cotton ball in each cheek when he talked, rumors of him wearing diapers on the set of Apocalypse Now. Nothing useful, but one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive — wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando. 

There was a channel that played the baby in fuzzy black and white, looking like she was about to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store. They tuned into it at night, all of them in their separate beds, and this is what she used to think the angels did, watch the channel that played her. If so much as a sock slipped off the baby, they could call, and God would move into frame from nowhere and put the sock back on.

"Still," the doctors urged them finally, "don't go home and look this up." That was the difterence between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die. 

If she had stayed, she might have gotten addicted to pills too, she realized. Something about the way the lunch-bag-colored leaves wadded in the gutters in autumn, something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives. Something about her memory of the multiplication table, with its fat devouring zero at the very corner and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue.

As a teenager, she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings, but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project. Why were the trees here so brown, so stunted? Why did the billboards announce LOOSE, HOT SLOTS? Why did her mother collect Precious Moments, why did the birds seem to say BUR-GER KING, BUR-GER KING, and why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident-and-injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease?

She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines, fromn the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that looked disgusting, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time, from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.

The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal — who am I failing to protect? — had found its stopped-clock answer. 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 rainwise 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?

Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.

How were we supposed to write now that we could no longer compare anything to a phantom limb? Was the phrase "the Braille of her nipples" to be absolutely retired? Were we just never to say that someone "inclined her head like a geisha" ever again? Could we not call the weather bipolar without risking the prison of public opinion? Not imply that birdwatchers are autistic? Could we not say the crescent moon was "as slender as a poor person"? Not say the sun "crashed inevitably into the mountains like a woman driver"? Take all shades and strengths of coffee away, if we could no longer hold it up to people's faces!

The biggest fight she and her husband had ever had had been about the Milgram experiment. He had never heard of it, and even after she looked it up for him online, expressed doubt that it shed any light on human behavior. Finally she lost her head. "If you refuse to accept... that we are LITTLE RODENTS... who would TORTURE EACH OTHER under the RIGHT CONDITIONS... then GET OUT OF THIS APARTMENT!" Bewildered, he had left, and then returned twenty minutes later with a nice white cheddar, which she guessed was some kind of sick, twisted joke.

YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY, her phone announced, and played a slideshow of her trying to get a good picture of her butt in a hotel bathroom, at one point lifting up her leg and balancing it on the towel rack in order to get a better highlight on her left glute. She had shrieked when she realized the towel rack was heated, and accidentally took a photo of herself as she toppled sideways, with the sullen comet of her least photogenic orifice in full view. "I'll want them after I have kids," she heard her sister saying. "I'll want them in fifty years, when I'm old" — in the nursing home, on an ice floe, looking back to herself as she really was.

Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn't it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.

"Have you heard from _____ lately?" her mother asked on the phone, and invoked the specter of a classmate who had escaped, who was nowhere to be found in any of the places where you typed in names. Her job was so legitimate that it seenmed like a reproach: Aerospace Engineer. Had she, through her goodness and unswerving concentration, broken off into one of the better timelines? Every few years she typed in the name and called up only the same unresolving pictures of the girl she had known, posing next to a machine that had carried her somewhere other than into the future, her familiar flesh still partially made from those orders of cheese fries they used to share in high school.

Twice a month she and her husband had an argument about whether she would be able to seduce the dictator in order to bring him down. "I don't know that he would even recognize you as a woman," he said doubtfully, but she maintained that all she needed was a long blonde wig. At one point she actually screamed at him and lifted up her shirt. “You're saying I'm not hot enough to change the course of human events? You're telling me he wouldn't go for THESE?"

"What is it like to have a child right now?" she asked her brother after everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet and what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth time. "Oh, it's great," he told her. "Everything's on fire, so you no longer have to worry about doing a good job." His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably a answered that he was a gun.

It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. 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.

When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn't hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, "My whole life is in there!" as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE FIRST NOVEL FROM PATRICIA LOCKWOOD 'I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet' Sally Rooney, author of Normal People 'A literary star ... Captures better than anything I've ever read what it's like to be online' Hadley Freeman, Guardian 'A furiously original novel, alive and unstable' Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror A Guardian, Times, Daily Mail, Esquire, Irish Independent, Irish Times, Elle, Independent and Stylist Highlight for 2021 A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet – or what she terms 'the portal'. 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 increasing absurdity 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. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the infinite scroll and a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021

Katherine

david

I was so excited to read this book and I tried really hard to like it. But nope. It reads like the random and very rambling thoughts of an individual, which it is. I found it difficult to follow and not enjoyable unfortunately. I hate abandoning books, but this is an exception. 

Saffia

Patrick Book

The first half of this is extremely hilarious, even for someone who is medium-online, at best. The second half is a remarkable about-face that is worth the emotional whiplash. What a weird but emotional story!

Bria

-2 stars because i didn't understand part 1 but part 2 was so damn good.

i mean... i feel bad giving this book such a low rating since the second part of the book did make me Feel and apparently its events are autobiographical. BUT the whole premise is just... dumb? like yeah, internet bad, we should all spend much more time in the real life because you never know when time will start running out. but it could've been executed much better.

John Manoogian III

** spoiler alert **
           I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Lindy

I couldn't find much to like here. On the other hand, I don't think it's bad; I just found it tedious. The first half primarily consists of ironic repetition of Twitter clichés. "Woman with an internet addiction discovers what really matters and logs off amid a personal or family crisis" is a self-published essay cliché. (One of the reasons I appreciate Surveys is how thoroughly it resists this cliché.) (view spoiler)[Angelic, dying, disabled children are a frequently offensive cliché. (hide spoiler)]. And the characters are not sufficiently developed for No One is Talking About This to be compelling as a grief novel. Judging by some of the acknowledgements, much of the second half of the book is heavily inspired by events in the author's life, but that alone doesn't mean it's going to be more emotionally affective to me, an unrelated reader.

Cody Degen

What rating do you give a book that you despised 80% of? I’m Internet poisoned, I don’t need to read a book of “haha remember that meme, haha isn’t it funny how being on twitter melts your brain?” I get it’s supposed to be relatable and incisive but who da fuck wants to read an actual book about this? I’m so mad that I went against my better judgment and read this

Geoffrey Froggatt

This book was a commentary on social media and how it has shaped us. Whether it was a good commentary, I’m still not so sure. Maybe a decent commentary on the peak of social media during the 21st century. Much of this book felt like a look at social media from a western lens and perspective. While I did understand and see what this book was trying to do, I can’t help but feel like this book was instantly dated the second that it was published due to the nature of its content, the specific internet landscape and references that won’t hold up in a few years, never mind a hundred years. A lot of this book won’t be relevant in the future, though I suppose it does function as a time capsule for this specific moment in time and cultural history. This book talks a lot about how hard it is to explain and describe internet culture to those who aren’t wrapped up in it, and I feel that sentiment will ring more true to the people of the future who read this book and try to understand the hyper-specific dated references more than anyone else. Maybe this is the intention. It is undeniable that internet culture and social media has shaped our lexicon and warped us in ways that have altered our politics, our social interactions, our identities and much more. 

I did like the commentary on cancel culture, doomscrolling, internet discourse, memes, online radicalization, social media addiction and chronically online social interactions. I did find the protagonist’s reference to the United States President as “The Dictator” distasteful for people who have lived under actual dictatorship, but I think that that out-of-touch western centric way of thinking was the whole point of the protagonist’s initial characterization. I was 25% of the way through this book before I realized that the protagonist is nameless. This is definitely intentional and fits the story and themes of the book very well. This book made me ponder what the information highway is doing to our brains, and what will future generations look like as the information highway grows and increases in intensity. The writing and constant commentary on social media and the internet was sometimes overwhelming, but I do feel like that was intentional. I feel like a lot of topics that were parodied and referenced in this book could have been expanded on and delved into more deeply, be given more nuance and explored through the eyes of the protagonist, but I also feel like that would have been even more overwhelming, and it would have slowed down the story and made it unnecessarily over complicated and long. To be fair, my changes wouldn’t be conducive to this story, it would most likely just become a collection of essays about the internet and online culture of the 21st century. 

This book felt like less of a story than it was an exploration of 21st century internet culture, and the protagonist felt less like a character as she did a vehicle for the author’s opinions and ideas about the information highway. This book does feel like it was two novels, which are literally split into two parts. The first, a surface-level overwhelming commentary on internet culture. The second, a family navigating tragedy and learning what does and doesn’t matter in life. The first part was chaotic and overwhelmingly constant, and the transition into the second part was sudden, the tone of the writing changed and the lack of constant commentary was noticeable. It felt like a veil was lifted, or the protagonist woke from a dream. There were moments when the protagonist thought in her internet language, but it was a contrast to what was going on in the story from then on. These two parts feel like entirely two different stories, and that does feel intentional. 

The nameless protagonist felt like a cog in the online machine in the first part, and became a fully fleshed out human being in the second part. The writing style was eloquent and succinct, and was anything but amateur. I felt envious of the author’s vocabulary and capabilities as a wordsmith. It wasn’t a surprise when I learned that the author is a poet and essayist, I could tell from her excellent prose. I recommend this book to anyone who wants an eloquent look into 21st century internet culture and a family tragedy. It was made clear from the writing (even before the acknowledgements) that the second part of the story was a very personal one to the author, and it infused the writing with so much heart and personal touch. I think that the most beautiful pieces of writing come from the personal lived experiences of the authors that write them. The final half of this book has made that very clear for me. As much as I can see and respect what the author has done here, the story itself wasn’t something I personally enjoyed as it wasn’t my usual taste, but I can still appreciate the intention of the author and recognize that they’ve done what they set out to do successfully.

I almost can't comment on this book since Parts 1 and 2 are so incongruous, but I can at least say that the entirety of it feels very real. It certainly captures the zeitgeist of the early Trump era and it probably has a very limited shelf life. There will be diminishing returns on the understandability of this work, so if it's on your TBR list you should read it sooner rather than later. 

Ashlyn

Cristian Garcia

** spoiler alert **
           I really dislike when I can't connect with a book, and specially with a book with so many accolades. I always feel is only me who doesn't like it, therefore I force myself to finish the book and see if I will eventually enjoy it.

This is exactly what happened to me now. 

The first part of 'No one is talking about this' was confusing (to say the least). I felt I was reading someone's feed, and I thought the feed was boring.

Then the 2nd part did it for me. The 2nd part is more explicit, easy to follow and made me 'click'
Characters don't have a name, 'the portal' is a big part of the story and as I read, I felt the life of an influencer was too different to mine, but the 2nd part gave me a glimpse into her pregnancy and daughter's desease. 

At some point, I was reading a part that says 'RELATED SEARCHED' and then I thought life -digital and traditional- is all the same. Then this nameless character became human to me and I connected with her story.

Her daughter's dead connected me with her life.

Not sure if I liked the book but I'm happy I made it through.

Midori Kobayashi

2/5 stars


it's one of those books, that's meant to be quirky and not-like-other-ones but it just didn't work for me. the first half was okayish (the unnamed MC reminded me of the MC from Fleabag) but the second part just didn't work for me- fell flat even. 

i couldn't even relate to half the stuff like maybe it's a third-world thing but some things were just not it.

Shona Tiger

TW/CW Death of a child; grief.

Happily, I went into this book without much expectation. It made some waves on the book scene, but I didn’t see much. It’s very clever, and really funny at first; and then it deals with the death of a child (TW), which is about as far from funny as you can get.

The first half of the book is essentially Us on Twitter (the Portal, in the book) or Facebook, for the two Olds still on there: the inanity, the utter drivel we fill our lives with, every day. I laughed out loud many times — and cringed, too, because who likes mirrors? Some examples at the end of this post (had to choose just a few of my highlights; there are so many things to be embarrassed over. Also, omg, SM is making us into the same person!)

The second half of the book (or maybe last third? too lazy to check) deals with the protagonist’s sister finding out her unborn child has Proteus Syndrome, and the shattering that follows. It is beautifully, sensitively done. The absolute contrast between the two halves of the book, the transformation of the protagonist from a mindless Tool of the Hive Mind to a struggling human being is one of the best transitions I’ve ever read. I also learnt a lot about Proteus Syndrome, and had my heart quietly broken by the small details of a family dealing with having a child with a terminal illness.

In short, a read that was very much worth my time, and one of those books that will stay with me — a book, even, that I’d be happy to re-read in the future. Come for the absolute wit and hilarious commentary on how social media is melting our brains; stay for the reminder about what matters.

Rated: 9/10.

Ben Jenkins

i laughed, i cried. the only book i think that's ever actually made me do both

Maria Otero

Wonko the Sane

All through the first half I was thinking this would be a three star book, and then the second half destroyed me completely and recontextualised the first half utterly. I spent the last half hour of my time with this book crying inconsolably. I’ll never read this again, and I’ll never forget it.

Jayme Bosio

You have to give this book a chance. The book is short and the writing is beautiful, so that makes it easier, but there were several moments where I was thinking - “Come on…if there is no plot, I at least need some character development.” But the book gets to its heart about halfway through. And it is worth it.

Lilly

"Is there life after the internet? 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"--

Charlotte 

Katie Chua

I did not like this book. I don't think it can call itself a novel. I see what she was trying to do, but I just don't think it was well-done or said anything new about the internet or life. I didn't think it was funny, but maybe that's because I don't know meme culture very well, and I can't believe this book got so much hype (but also, I can...I worked in book marketing so I'm not surprised). Anyway, not very good.

it is not so much that i want to write a complete review as much it is that i want to say, i remember reading this for the very first time and i remember feeling rooted. 

there is a part that became the most memorable to me, perhaps because of the type of thing that i'm living through right now, and it was: "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?"

toch

it is not so much that i want to write a complete review as much it is that i want to say, i remember reading this for the very first time and i remember feeling rooted. 

there is a part that became the most memorable to me, perhaps because of the type of thing that i'm living through right now, and it was: "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?"

yeah.

Marion

Easy read but requires you to be “chronically online”

Fraser Simons

I immediately got on with this. Maybe it’s because I’m a “geriatric” millennial (probably exactly the ‘sweet spot’ age for this book, tbh), but this language just made sense to me. More than making sense, I often found the prose work to be a rare cadence and diction that creates a reading flow state. 

It is also perfect form for the story it’s telling. We follow an Extremely Online woman who became famous for a one-time innocuous tweet, but then became so incredibly enmeshed in the culture that the Portal—which is used as a shorthand for interacting with anything social media—becomes as real as real life. If not more real. Hyper real. And her husband, not online at all, inadvertently acts as a grounding mechanism she may not know she needs. 

By having to explain what is funny or rage inducing or otherwise ranks as the ‘news’ of the day, she’s forced to contextualize it outside of the online space. 

In the later half of the book it shifts it’s insightful exploration further straddling the online and the real, when the woman becomes pregnant, and her perspective necessarily shifts.

No One Is Talking About This was surprisingly affecting for me. I found it witty and biting and even hilarious sometimes. Especially the many in-jokes of the Internet that simply do not translate when you try to explain them IRL. It’s a book written by someone who is actually on social media; a rare thing, somehow, for a book on the subject. 

It tackles large emotions and topics with ease, and it does all this in a way I could so relate to that I didn’t really find the transition from first half to the later jarring. I saw most reviews feeling like it was completely different. Almost two separate books. Perhaps it depends heavily upon your own relationship to the Portal? I felt everything followed logically to the text. Even inevitably, perhaps. Our parasocial, simultaneously sweet and sour relationships with all things Online chronicles many a milkshake duck; both in the past and oncoming, in our (near) future.

Angbeen Abbas

i'm just very much in awe of this book. it was moving and funny and sad, and definitely the most unusual reading experience i've had in a while. don't read this if you haven't been on twitter for a while.

Strange and beautiful and heart wrenching and just not at all what I expected in the best possible way.

david &
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

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