Review: Patricia Lockwood explores life online, and off, in 'No One Is Talking About This'

We’re all very online because that’s the place to be. And it’s unclear whether the internet has been our saving grace during this particular era of social distancing or whether it has plunged us into a seething marsh of bad takes – maybe both. Patricia Lockwood ("Priestdaddy") elucidates this tug-of-war in her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (Riverhead, 224 pp., ★★★ out of four), out Tuesday, giving us the distance to see the bizarre culture that’s souring beneath the screen.

At least, that’s the first half of the novel, which seems to move gracefully outside of time. Initially, there doesn’t appear to be any sort of direction to the story. The novel’s cadence mimics the relentless spiral of doomscrolling – though, without its frenetic, exhausting energy. Instead, it captures that boundless online space, dubbed “the portal” in the book, and distills it into elegant vignettes, spliced through with dispatches from the outside world. Paired with Lockwood’s skillful imagery, it’s mesmerizing to read.

“No One Is Talking About This” is also funny. It’s self-aware and unafraid to be ridiculous when the moment calls for it: “The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”

So much of the novel is levity and referential humor (which may not make it the best fit for readers who are not online at all). But then, in the second half of book, a real-life family emergency brings the narrator elsewhere, away from the portal. All of a sudden, her focus is on her pregnant sister’s precarious health and a nearly impossible situation that draws dividing lines through her family.

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That’s where “No One Is Talking About This” saves itself from potential cliche. It would have been easy to condescendingly lament over kids glued to their greasy iPads and their parents equally enraptured by their own glowing phones as the harbinger of society’s eventual downfall, but that wouldn’t have been truthful, or impactful. Instead, “No One Is Talking About This” simply presents a new story where the portal isn’t the priority, and something tender and heartrending takes its place. In these moments, being online loses its gravity.

The old adage, “pics or it didn’t happen,” has evolved. Does it really matter if it’s not on the internet? Is it even real if it’s not online? Who will even care about your life if you’re not announcing it into your phone’s front camera with a beauty filter smoothing over the pores in your skin? Even social media cleanses are documented by their absences and their inevitable returns.

But being offline isn’t really the ultimate goal of Lockwood’s book. “No One Is Talking About This” just shows us that, yes, life outside the portal is real, and of course, so many people will care, deeply and fully, whether it exists online or not.

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