No One Is Talking About This: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021

by Patricia Lockwood

Hardcover, 2021

Status

Available

Call number

813.6

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

Bloomsbury Circus (2021), Edition: 01, 224 pages

Description

"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"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member kidzdoc

When I read the Booker Prize shortlist I generally save books written by Americans for last, and after reading and thoroughly enjoying 'The Fortune Men', 'The Promise' and 'A Passage North', my favorite novel of 2021 to date, I picked up this nominee for this year's Most Clever American Novel, a

supposed satire about social media in American culture, which was somehow attached to a tragedy involving the baby of the main character's sister, based on the author's own sister and her child, who had the same fatal condition. This unnamed character is a famous social influencer, who cares about her popularity more than her marriage, and the first half of the book is filled with overly clever comments that left me cold and reminded me of listening to a bad standup comic who relied on crude jokes to entertain her audience:

"chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what"

"An episode of 'True Life' about a girl who liked to roll herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually."

"...which coffeemakers were but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ."

"She had become famous for a post that said simply, "Can a dog be twins?" That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the state of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember "Can a dog be twins?" instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let's face it, she didn't know either."

Imagine reading over 100 pages of similar drivel, with plenty of sophomoric butt, nipple and dildo humor mixed in. I nearly quit reading the book 50 pages in, but I read several reviews that encouraged me to continue, as the second half was said to be much better.

I held my nose and skimmed through the next 50 pages before reading the second part, in which the social influencer learns that her sister is carrying a child who appears to have a serious genetic disorder. Unfortunately Lockwood trivializes the grief that a mother and family experience when they learn that a yet to be born baby has a life altering and potentially fatal condition, the hope that the doctors were wrong and the baby will be normal, and the torturously slow process of watching the child's slow and inevitable decline towards a painful death. I occasionally care for children such as these in the hospital, and I was deeply offended by Lockwood's insensitive handling of this process, especially since her own sister had a child with the same fatal genetic condition. The last straw for me was the uproarious laughter by several family members just before the baby's funeral, which I found infuriating and deeply insulting.

I would hope that Ms Lockwood obtained her sister's permission to "craft" a novel about her late child and family, but even if she did I thought that this was incredibly vulgar, cruel and distasteful, and the attempt to meld these two themes didn't work for me at all. This is a "love it or hate it" book, and I fall firmly in the latter category, as this sorry excuse for a novel is a perfect example of why I don't like modern American literature, with few exceptions.

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LibraryThing member Carmenere

Perhaps the judges of the Booker Prize chose this novel, and I'm using the word novel loosely, for their shortlist because it certainly is a reflection of our current state of being. A state where innumerable humans are caught up in social media and, at times, feel the need to become an active part

of it and it's jargon.
As the unnamed protagonist in this book displays, the internet can become all too consuming and drag one into a bottomless pit of opinions and positions.
The book is written as if it were a bunch of tweets and for that reason maybe readers who are apart of the twitter family will find it cohesive and understandable. Others, like myself, who have never found the point of short unexplained tweets will find this book annoying.

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LibraryThing member booklove2

A woman gets to tour the world after being famous for a dumb thing she wrote in the Portal. I love that even the internet isn't mentioned, using this fictional Portal to become all of the internet and all the apps that have or will ever live and die... making the book transcend time, the time of

the internet being most fickle of all. I love that Lockwood writes these perfectly crafted little snippets for the internet distracted inclined, and definitely think the Twitteresque snippets are the point... It's taking what Jenny Offill does (and also reminded me of the gem 'Goodbye, Vitamin' by Rachel Khong) and bringing this incredible honesty and clear-eyed view of what social media/the internet has done to us. I have had many of these thoughts before but I could never say them this clearly and hilariously. Also quite funny, I think Lockwood intentionally makes you google so many things. No other book that I have read has said such truth about our technology yet. None of these snippets are extraneous, no word misplaced. Which would seem tough to do in a book like this, about the randomness and distraction of the internet. Easily, a book like this in less genius hands would have annoyed me. I am not Extremely Online and never really was. I was worried the internet of it all would annoy me, possibly be a bit too hipstery. But Lockwood is at that perfect age of being born in 1982 when she can remember when the internet wasn't constantly in your hand or even in the home, but also young enough to remember every meme that ever happened. But still, I was amazed each and every time a snippet is perfectly crafted and placed. And then the second half of the book happens. The woman is called back to Ohio from her travels. And it's like the real needs to grab her hand and take her from the drowning ocean of the internet. All I can say otherwise, to do the book justice: this book is perfect. Heart and humor and explaining our human problem with the internet. Thank you for having the courage to write it.

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LibraryThing member albertgoldfain

An experimental and inventive superposition of online life and brutal reality.

LibraryThing member jonerthon

I once said that Patricia Lockwood is the funniest person on Twitter, and this title captures her talent in that format for a much longer and more engrossing story. The narrator is well-known enough for her online personality to support herself on guest speaker and talking head-type gigs, even

though the content she posts ranges from inane to full-on bathroom humor. In "the portal," the completely overwhelming online world that sustains her, becoming meme famous is the only recognized form of respect anyway.

From there, the narrator's IRL family navigates a terrible crisis, and Lockwood continues to balance the Always Online With Little Attention Span tone as her protagonist tries to make sense of this. If you've been on Twitter for a while you will likely recognize some of the memes and political scandals that she references; if not, it might be an alien world to try to understand. Either way, I think it provided helpful reflections on living in 2022 where our IRL and online selves can easily cleave into two.

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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also referenced as a book with a good insight into the internet and its impact on our society. Based on this I decided to read it. I was very disappointed. This was lowest rating I have ever given a book on Librarything. The main character has

notoriety as an internet poster. The book is written in short paragraphs which were creative but also very nonsensical to me. I believe this is a book that would be enjoyed by a twitter user and someone deeply involved in social media. The first 2/3 of the book deals with this continuing dialog the non-named main character engages in. The tone changes when she is informed that her pregnant sister will be having a baby with proteus syndrome which is incredibly rare and ends with early death. The remainder of the book consists of the same style of writing but deals with her engagement with her sister and her new niece who ultimately dies after 6 months. This part of the book was slightly better but not worthwhile waiting for. Again, this book has glowing reviews from many but also many 1-2 stars . Probably the worst Book Prize nominee that I have ever read.

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LibraryThing member miss.mesmerized

Her life does not take place in the real world anymore, everything that is important happens online, on the portal. She travels from place to be to place to be not really caring about where she is but only about what she can make of this experience in her virtual bubble. Her followers are not only

her supporters but also her way to escape from those real problems which are looming over mankind. She has gone further than others, than the dictator who took over the country in 2016 and rules via the platform, she has her only language and her own style which is post-ironic and at the same time post-sense. Reading her own feed from just a couple of months ago, she is unable to understand herself. Suddenly, however, reality catches her and another universe with completely different values and rules opens up.

Patricia Lockwood has been praised for her poetry, “No One Is Talking About This” is her debut novel which I’d call rather experimental in its quite unique style. The book is broken in two parts, the first dealing with the unnamed narrator’s virtual life, the second when she has to come down to earth and face problems of the real world.

The narrator feels detached from her body which has become a mere shell and only serves as a projection screen for her online self. She is aware of the number of her followers and deduces her importance from it. Today’s influencers are so far form reality that the protagonist does not seem to be exaggerated since they all are so over the top that they have lost all credibility and humanness. Lockwood cleverly reveals online mechanisms we all have already fallen prey to: looking up something, digging deeper, roaming from one website to the next, from one forum to another, just to end up in a kind of conspiracy bubble.

“One day it would all make sense! One day it would all make sense – like Watergate, about which she knew noting and also did not care. Something about a hotel.”

Yes, she is totally superficial and stupid and cannot survive a single day without her cell phone. It needs a major blast to take her back into something like a real life. And quite unexpectedly, her values shift, her focus moves from her fictional online self to real humans.

It’s the novel of the moment, reminding us that there is more than the next tweet or Instagram post. The protagonist is wonderfully created and showing her ability to open her eyes and change perspective also provides some hope in those chaotic times.

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LibraryThing member kcshankd

I was not sure where this was going for the first third of the book. The format seemed forced, of course mirroring the twitter format. And filthy.

But oh is there a turn, and Lockwood delivers a heart-felt tale that will catch in your throat at the end.

LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

This novel old in short segments, the first half is about her life centering around the Portal, a stand-in for twitter. She went viral once and has been speaking and making appearances with other people who are twitter-famous. Then something real happens to a family member.

Lockwood wrote the funny,

heart-breaking and perfect memoir, Priestdaddy, and this novel is similar in tone and with characters who largely correspond to her family members. But while Priestdaddy is a book you could pick up in a decade or two and enjoy, [No One is Talking About This] is for this moment in time, being a snapshot of life during the Trump Presidency and of that moment of extremely on-line culture. Lockwood is a poet and it shows here.

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LibraryThing member mhartford

The first half is a bit of a plotless slog through aphoristic Twitter speak, the second half has much more emotional impact.

LibraryThing member rivkat

Unsurprisingly poetic, stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman who is embedded in the “portal” (social media) to the exclusion of other parts of life, and whose consciousness starts to stream off into nothingness while she is filled with rage and love; then, a family tragedy rips her from

the portal and back into a different kind of time than internet time. Beautifully done if the constant paragraphs and half-paragraphs and quotes of real and made-up memes won’t annoy you exceedingly.

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LibraryThing member Beth.Clarke

Odd, odd novel. I get the gist. The portal is the internet. The first part was sometimes funny, but with no real direction unless circles count. The second part was certainly better and showed the author's talent. However, it just didn't work for me.

LibraryThing member alexrichman

Sits somewhere above Crudo but below Weather in the TwitLit cannon, in my opinion. After reading the acknowledgements you learn this is far more memoir than novel, but it's no less moving for that.

LibraryThing member whitsunweddings

On the third page of No One Is Talking About This, I read about the narrator washing her legs in the shower because "she had recently learned that some people didn't" and immediately realised a. that she was referring to the "white people don't wash their legs" discourse that's been on Twitter for

the past few years and b. if you weren't aware of that, this passage would make very little sense. I don't think this is a bad thing, necessarily - write what you know, and all that - but be warned that unless you are Very Online, great chunks of this book will be likely be incomprehensible, like watching a film in a language you don't speak with machine-translated captions on. It almost needs footnotes.

Like many other reviewers, I initially found this quite vapid (yesterday my friend ran me through the plot of the Lucinda Riley series she's working her way through, to which I responded "I'm reading a novel in which a woman goes on Twitter a lot") - but the second half, the part with the real-life family tragedy, unfolds very sadly and with a strange beauty. A few of my co-reviewers seem to find her treatment of it flippant, offensive - to which I counter, that the author doesn't make dumb jokes about dead babies to make light of the situation or anyone's suffering. This is who she is, a person in this place and time, this is how she communicates, and these are the words that come out of her when faced with tremendous sadness. It's not good or bad, it just is - and that's kind of the whole point, really.

This book will definitely not be for everyone - but as a novel of how grief is experienced through the lens of late-2010s internet culture - like a cat gif with the fake weeping eyes, it has a strange, sad charm.

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LibraryThing member nmele

Patricia Lockwood has written an innovative, funny and poignant novel which somehow takes social media as its model, its perspective and in part its subject matter, yet delves deeper than social media does. No wonder this novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it's excellent: intelligent, sad,

funny, astute.

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LibraryThing member Dreesie

The first half is all about a woman whose life is lived through the portal (ie the internet). In between traveling and speaking about her twitter jokes and keeping up her online persona, she laughs at past jokes. Many of these past jokes are real--I suspect they all are, I just don't remember them

all.

The second half is when this woman is pulled back into real life after her sister has a several disabled baby. She lives in Ohio where late-term abortion is illegal. She is not supposed to travel. She has the baby early when her own health begins to be threatened. The main character spends a lot of time in Ohio, getting to know her niece and what she is capable of, loving her while she can. A big bill comes at the end, of course.

A fascinating look at how many live today. What is no one talking about--the online discourse and lack of personal interaction? The stupidity we see as so important to keep up with? The risks to mothers' lives with no legal abortion? The child who is able to enjoy some things (and as Lockwood says, her world is all she knows)? The giant hospital bill that comes at the end, for a very sick baby a family was forced to carry? Or all of it?

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LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt

Lockwood is like a 21st century Nanki-poo. “A wandering minstrel … a thing of shreds and patches.” She delivers her plot in posts. At first disconcerting, but quickly familiar to anyone with social media addiction. A recognisable jumble of poetry, jokes and politics.

And then, about mid-point

a kick in the guts. An almost-narrative. Tragic. True. Hand on heart reading. Deeper breaths.

This may be a book to own. And to pick up again and again.

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LibraryThing member paulmorriss

I'm not one for weird or challenging books, but I hung on with this one through the initial chapters, and I was mostly engaged.

LibraryThing member bibliovermis

The first half of the book was basically a very long tweet thread—full of very amusing one-liners, but I couldn't see the point or purpose of it, and almost put it down. But, at about 54% of the way through, the actual plot dropped, and it got very good from there. Once there was a narrative to

follow, all the things that had previously annoyed me about the book's experimentally written style, flow and structure suddenly no longer did! The back half of the novel was still very funny but also very engaging and emotionally affecting, but it was a little difficult to get there.

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LibraryThing member browner56

The comedian Dennis Miller once told the following joke with his customary perception and wit: A father was reflecting sentimentally on having had a real bonding moment with his young son. It seems they just finished sitting down together to play a video game of a father and son playing a game of

catch in the back yard! Of course, how funny you find that story to be may well depend on how old you are. The irony of experiencing life in a virtual world rather than through direct engagement is likely to be appreciated very differently by those who remember a time before social media and the internet became so pervasive. That is also important context for trying to fathom the depths of No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood’s affecting look at a life lived inside and out of “the portal”.

The novel is divided into two parts that differ quite a bit in tone and mood, if not in writing style. In the first part, we meet the unnamed protagonist as she goes about her days as an internet star for the quirky observations she has posted (e.g. “Can a dog be twins?”). She exists almost entirely in her virtual world, all but ignoring the husband, family, and friends that anchor her real life. This situation changes abruptly in the second part of the book after she learns that the baby girl her pregnant sister is carrying has Proteus syndrome (an extremely rare genetic disorder resulting in bone and muscle overgrowth) and will almost certainly die at a very young age. Deeply moved, the protagonist disconnects from the portal and spends the six months of the baby’s life fully engaged in the daily routine of loving and caring for her niece. She eventually returns to her previous virtual life, but as a woman whose perspective has changed for good.

I had a decidedly mixed reaction to this novel. I did find myself very moved by the heart-wrenching and courageous tale of the afflicted child and her impact on the lives of everyone she contacted. As revealed in the Acknowledgments, this part of the story is based on the real-life experience of the author’s own sister and brother-in-law, which makes the force of the words and images that much more powerful. In contrast, the entire first half was entirely forgettable; written in short, mannered paragraphs reminiscent of Twitter feeds, the section appeared to be more about developing an idiosyncratic style than a meaningful message. In fact, I am not sure what original insights about life in the portal are gained and it does nothing to prepare the reader for the jarring transition to come. So, while I certainly appreciated the author’s passion and creativity in telling this story, it was not a wholly successful reading experience for me.

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LibraryThing member LindaLoretz

The narrator is consumed by the internet and speaking in disconnected tweet-like pronouncements. Her life is absurd and detached from reality. Yet she is navigating the world of politics, climate change, and much more based on online posts and queries. Online friends and communication's impersonal

and detached nature becomes painfully apparent when, in real life, her sister’s pregnancy is in peril. As a result, the story becomes more engaging and free-flowing in the second part of the book, but her humanity and vulnerabilities also take precedence. I decided that this book is an excellent statement about the differences between the chaos of online groupthink and the personal interactions that sometimes only occur in times of tragedy.

The first time I attempted to read this book, I couldn’t follow Lockwood’s disjointed commentary about many disparate issues. Although I could figure out what most of the allusions referred to, I wasn’t sure there was any inherent value to continuing to read. But, after reading several reviews and noting that The New York Times named No One is Talking About This as one of the best books of 2021 and realizing it was nominated for a Booker Prize, I went back to it. This time it was so much more engaging –especially the second part.

Since I just finished facilitating a discussion group about millennial authors. I looked up Lockwood’s age, and since she was born in 1981, she is a millennial, and the writing reflects many of the attributes of other works written by her age group:

How global capitalism affects an individual and a desire to hate it
Derision for haters
Thorny issues related to money and class
Social media and digital communication everywhere
Satire, sometimes very dark
Being influenced and influencing others
Rootless, anxious life

Some quotes from the book that I noted include:
Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages
(p. 4). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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.
(p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice.
(p. 33). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??
(p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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LibraryThing member franoscar

Not sure what to say. I don't know what is a spoiler.
Old age is this. So much seemed banal, things that have been said so much before.
Hard to tell if narrator understands why it is so important to change the words and the thinking behind racism, etc.
Does theme of the "dictator" minimize/mistake

reality and claim a victim status that is not earned?
I was surprised at the background presented -- the organized religion, the privileged family.
The final section brought mixed emotions. Anger at the external forces, anger at the privilege, anger at the sentimentality. Sympathy and sorry but cynicism too.
Lack of human connection? I couldn't really tell. It is easy to be jealous.

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LibraryThing member Castlelass

“Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”

I picked this book up because it is longlisted for the

Booker Prize. It is a book in two parts. Part One is about how the internet, called “the portal,” is changing our world, and not for the better. Part Two pulls the protagonist back into the real world to deal with a human crisis involving her sister.

Part One is written in a series of short paragraphs, which are occasionally connected to each other by a common thread, but more often can be read as standalone comments. They appear to be taken from online conversations. I got the gist of what the author is trying to say – how we are becoming addicted to the portal, which is warping the way we think; however, it is not a particularly enjoyable reading experience, almost like reading a series of non-sequiturs.

Part Two is much more to my liking, as the paragraphs are now more related to each other and tell a story about the protagonist’s sister finding out about a fetal birth defect. It offers social commentary on several contemporary social issues. It creatively references politics, current events, and internet memes.

The book will likely appeal most to those who enjoy experimental fiction. These types of books are “hit or miss” with me. Thanks to Part Two, this book was more “hit” than “miss,” and I am glad to have read it.

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LibraryThing member jonbrammer

Lockwood is a poet first and a memoirist second. Her oblique approach to her subjects allows her to play with tone and description. Not all of it works. Most of it does. It reminds me most of Woolf's "The Waves" in that it tries to capture the mental state of living in the world (Lockwood name

checks Woolf at one point).

The main difference is that NOITAT is peripatetic, both physically and psychologically. She is on a book tour for the first half, which dovetails with the mental state of being very online, of processing the world through the portal (as she calls it).

Edited to add: It's a novel! My entire perception of this book was skewed by the afterword - recency bias, I guess. But there is so much Plathesque overlap with "real" life that it changes your understanding of the plot.

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LibraryThing member ZeljanaMaricFerli

This is a messy book. The first half is written in snippets, vignettes referring to random online phenomena, viral tweets and memes in a sort of stream of consciousness kinda way. It's about people who live online and that is most of their reality.

This part was seriously boring, even though the

author can clearly write well, and there is an occasional great paragraph. I just know too many women who write similar things in a similar manner and are much better at connecting emotionally to the reader, so this left me cold.

The second part focuses on the "real life" events that are in complete contrast with the beginning of this book. It deals with some heavy topics, politics, law, grief... It was a lot more interesting and better written, but it never took off. The chopped-up structure didn't help.
As a result, although I really felt some parts, I couldn't really connect to this as a whole.

I wish I loved this more. I wish the second half started sooner in this book and that I could get into the mind of the narrator more.

But, as it is, it was very underwhelming.

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