No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood review: fizzing, filthy and funny

She’s an extravagantly talented writer who, perhaps more than anyone else, has taken possession of Twitter as a literary art form, says Claire Allfree
Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury
Claire Allfree18 February 2021

“What did it mean” thinks the Twitter addict protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s début novel as she describes waking up in the company of her phone each morning “under an avalanche of details, blissed pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia,..ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises”.

What did it mean “that she was allowed to see this?”

What indeed? What does it mean to spend so much of your life in the company of the internet’s “communal mind” that your husband tells you “you have a totally dead look on your face” as you engage in a furious twitter spat with a complete stranger?

Hurt feelings, thinks the protagonist. “He was always saying things like this just when she was at her most alive.” She begs him to buy her a safe disguised as a dictionary so she can lock away her phone. Two days later she is screaming at him for the code.

Lockwood – if you don’t know her name you are almost certainly not on Twitter - has been detonating some of the big questions surrounding connectivity and authenticity thrown up by our increasingly digitised lives since writing an essay two years ago titled How Do We Write Now?

She’s an extravagantly talented writer who, perhaps more than anyone else, has taken possession of Twitter as a literary art form (check out her unnerving sext parodies if you haven’t already). She’s also a poet (her harrowing 2013 poem Rape Joke went viral) and the author of an acclaimed memoir, Priestdaddy. “I’m not a novelist” she said in an interview to promote that book. Which begs the question of just what she is up to here.

Written in the frantic, scattershot voice of its protagonist, No One Is Talking About This mimics the plotless, performative insouciance of a Twitter feed, which is to say it fizzes with the over-stimulated aphoristic wit that has made Lockwood the darling of Twitter.

It’s a filthy, funny, strung-out prose poem that aims to capture precisely how we think and speak online and what that might mean, and it’s often both stingingly accurate and weirdly beautiful. “She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?”

Lockwood’s fictional avatar writes, on her compulsive participation in the collective conversation. “My phone tells me I have a new memory,” she observes bleakly, more than once. The election of Trump, referred to as the Dictator, is a “Gatsby was dead in the pool” moment.

Lockwood’s hyperactive self awareness – there is nothing you can throw at her that she won’t have already thought – gives her writing a wired, questioning restlessness that often bends back on itself. Everything is a huge joke even when it’s not. This can become exhausting.

For all Lockwood’s high wire mixing of multiple tonal registers, the inconsequential vitality of her prose also risks the same potential obsolescence as any tweet in a feed – if one paragraph/post doesn’t instantly hit home then why, you can simply scroll onto the next.

Yet slowly she builds up a horrified portrait of a collective consciousness straining for connection while simultaneously consuming itself. “Every day their attention must turn,” she 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. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision.”

Things change abruptly half-way through when the narrator’s sister becomes pregnant, and the baby is discovered to have a life threatening condition. There’s no room for “mad grief” on Twitter and so Lockwood ditches the irony and turns instead to a more conventional novelistic emotional register that captures with exquisite grace and truth the impact of this on her sister, her family, herself.

It’s an abrupt about-turn from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the unserious to the serious and, in the framework of the book, a bit of a cop out. If one of the fundamental questions in this book is how do we write seriously about ourselves in the age of Twitter, then Lockwood’s own answer would seem to be: at the end of the day in the same way we’ve always done.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury, £14.99)

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