Clair Wills
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead, 210 pp., $25.00
“Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. She is, like Lockwood herself, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends—all of whom appear in the novel—but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world online, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review. “Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him,” she tells the audience.
“But what about the stream-of-aconsciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.
There’s the pleasure of knowing that we need to hear “viral” in “contagious” in order to get the joke about shared behavior on and off the Internet, tweeting and yawning (and the satisfaction of knowing that she knows that we know that in stopping short of an explicit coronavirus allusion she is making a point). There’s the irony that streamof-consciousness in James Joyce (for the fart-lover is he, and the joke works properly only if we know it) involves inhabiting a mind not entirely our own, in which we are acted on as much as acting. And there’s the mildly disturbing awareness that Lockwood has got one over on us, with her disenchanting substitution of Joyce’s sexual fantasies for Joyce the writer as a whole. Are we doomed to think of Nora’s farts in tandem with Ulysses from now on? I think she hopes so.
Lockwood expects her reader to work hard. The novel is all about the importance of being in the know, and it won’t work unless we are prepared to join in, parsing the anecdotes. There is something very winning about Lockwood’s abundant faith not only that we can but that we will follow her. She jollies us along, leading us through the language and styles of ever more evolved platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), without explicitly naming any of them. She trusts us to keep up to speed, to catch meaning off the current vectors and to keep it circulating.
That passage is one of several in which Lockwood tries out labels (with exclamation marks!) for the kind of book she is writing: “The plot! That was a laugh.” What hope for storyline, when the novel simply follows the Lockwood character, an Internet obsessive, obsessing about the Internet? She scrolls, she showers, and she scrolls some more. She spends her time in bed engaged in “spellbound reading” of her phone—exactly the same reading that everybody else is doing. She posts, she messages, and she texts; her phone buzzes repeatedly in her pocket when she starts trending; she climbs onto stages in Australia and Japan and all over Europe and talks about the portal:
All around the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloud-bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?
She laughs, “Ahahaha!,” “the new and funnier way” to laugh. She knows to say “it me,” or “unbelievably me,” rather than “that’s just how I feel!” in response to a post about a warty frog, unutterably alone. She is absolutely in command of the language of the portal, and she writes about this command in discontinuous sections of prose that appear like lengthy tweets, separated by asterisks and gaps. Naturally she wonders about this style:
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.
Is there a way to write about the Internet that doesn’t merely reproduce the language of the Internet? In Toronto she meets a man “she had talked to so often in the portal” and hears him speak through his “actual mouth.” He is “one of the secret architects of the new, shared sense of humour,” not least because of a series of posts featuring images of his testicles, in a portal-ready version of Where’s Waldo?—hiding “increasing amounts of ball” in plain sight in pictures of rooms in his home. “You could write it, you know,” says Lockwood’s unnamed protagonist. Let us call her Lockwood.
“Someone could write it. But it would have to be like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A social novel.
Testicle man eyes her skeptically— what she is saying is possibly just not funny enough to count in his world. Or worse (a fatal error), perhaps she actually means it. The point for him is keeping one step ahead of the portal, generating new content and feeding the new sense of humor. Why would you need to write about it, rather than simply produce it? But she is interested in a different kind of future, one in which the past, including how it felt “to be a man around the turn of the century posting increasing amounts of his balls online,” might be preserved and understood. Already it may be too late for conservation, because the portal moves so fast: “Myspace was an entire life . . . . And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!”
It’s an odd ambition, when you think about it—to write a novel about the Internet. However much you jazz up the form you are folding new modes of communication back into old ones, and by mentioning Austen Lockwood wants us to notice this. The novel she has written is a hybrid beast: it is an arch descendant of Austen’s socioliterary style—a novel of observation, crossed with a memoir of a family crisis, and written as a prose poem, steeped in metaphor.
No
One Is Talking About This does feature a plot, if not exactly a “plot!,” and the plot even belongs to a genre— the disenchanted bildungsroman. As Lockwood moves deeper inside the portal she becomes increasingly alienated from “real life,” increasingly “locked in” to the collective consciousness. Lab rats in a cage get a pellet of food when they hit a button, but all you get for living in the portal and playing the game is to be more of a rat. She looks back wistfully to a time when the portal appeared to serve people rather than the other way around. The idea of spending time in a chat room seems positively Edenic compared to the new world in which “every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”
A school of fish, seen from above— it’s a gorgeous metaphor for communal life online, and it points to a contradiction in this novel, in which Lockwood repeatedly discovers new ways of saying that we have lost new ways of saying things: “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.” You start by pinging an elastic band at the back of the class, and before you know it you are part of a gang, talking only to the people who talk exactly as you do, listening only to your own echo:
It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals . . .
The alternative to spouting the shared doctrine of your online community is to try to keep ahead of the portal itself. But it is such hard work, not just being an ordinary fish, but being the first fish to catch the light in a dart of new direction: “It was so tiring to have