NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
A hyped novel from 2021, so I’m somewhat catching up with the zeitgeist. I’ve not read any other Lockwood stuff, though I am aware of her and I’ve met some of her fans. This book is really 2 books in one. The first half is an attempt to write how it feels to be online in the way that most of us are now. It’s a strange, mostly terrible, new feeling that is constantly changing and hard to pin down. People my age barely remember a time before it, those younger than me haven’t experienced anything else. Even those older than me, the Boomers, etc. are perhaps the most brain damaged by it, it’s perhaps one of the largest and certainly the quickest change in human subjectivity, ie how it feels to think and be alive, in all of human history. I partially came out here to rural Afrika to take a break from it, since I largely think it’s quite bad for us, tho I am typing this on a computer connected to the web, so make of that what you will. Like they said in Contact, they should have sent a poet, so it makes sense that a poet like Lockwood would get close to replicating this feeling of being online, which she calls the portal, in prose form. Stylistically the book is little paragraph long snippets, like tweets or blog posts that replicate the endless scroll. She comes up with some bangers that distill internet culture, among my favorites:
“Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and be delighted.”
“This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.”
“The more closely we associated the diet with cavemen the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves.”
“But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turns men into pigs.”
“But everyday their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, towards a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution with guacamole.”
In many ways the first part of the book reminded me of Virginia Woolf, in that the point was not the plot or the characters as much as recreating and reflecting back what it feels like to think and be alive. Lockwood manages to update this by recreating what an internet mediated consciousness feels like and it’s quite impressive.. The plot in the first part of the book, such as it is, involves a person getting semi-famous for a dumb tweet about a dog and living with this newfound quasi-celebrity. The second part of the book is still in a similar style, with the short pithy segments stacked on top of one another, but something of a plot and traditional stakes emerge. The narrator's sister has a baby that’s born with a terminal illness and the second part of the book charts what this 6 month period with a dying child is like. Obviously, the life and death of a child is just about as “real” as possible and as diametrically opposed to the fakeness of the net as can be. This apparently did happen to Lockwood, as we learn in the afterward, so I suppose this section is technically autofiction. I liked the first part of the book better. She’s still a great poetic writer in part 2 but that part is pretty typical trauma-event memoir style stuff, which is not often my bag. She really does nail part one though, she should have just stuck to that for a whole book, it would have been more controversial but more interesting, imo. Either way, she’s a great writer, and this is a cool little book. 21 dying babies.
