Jan 15

Jan 15 No One Is Talking About This

Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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.

TL;DR Review

No One Is Talking About This isn’t going to be for everyone, but it was for me. It’s abstract, but really captures the claustrophobic feeling of the current zeitgeist.

For you if: You like to read poetry.

Full Review

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”

There was, perhaps, no literary fiction more polarizing in 2021 than No One Is Talking About This. As it was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize, I don’t think there’s any arguing that Lockwood has done something big here — but I totally understand why it didn’t work for some people. Personally, I liked it a lot.

It’s a short novel — I read it in one sitting — broken into two parts. The first is a series of vignettes about “the portal” (like the internet or maybe just Twitter, but like, turned up to 11), where the narrator is famous and to which she is addicted. In the second part, a family tragedy wrenches her away from the foggy, disoriented life she’d been leading.

Okay, so: I really think that to enjoy this book, you have to enjoy reading poetry. Lockwood is also a poet, and it shows. Reading poetry is often more about feeling than anything else; you have to sort of just relax and notice what kinds of emotions and images the poem stir up as you go, and THAT is the whole point of it. So too here, especially in part one. If that’s not your thing, you aren’t going to like this. But I did. And I’ll also say that I listened to the audiobook as I read along in print, and I think it made a HUGE difference. Highly recommend.

I was really impressed by how this book was absurd but also hit so, so close to home. It captures a claustrophobic feeling that you can’t name about the current zeitgeist. The trap of liberal perfectionism, the urge to look away but absolute inability to do so, the pain of having loved ones with a completely different moral compass, the competing desire to join in and also reject all of it, the paradox of your own personality. How it takes a tragedy to pull us off the hamster wheel but then everything shrinks and slows, and that might be when we start to live the most.