Patricia Lockwood's new novel No One Is Talking About This is fragmented and poetic, it's hard to describe but easy to read; I would call it a more lyrical, more poignant Mark Leyner-like stream-of-internet data dump . . . the portal has taken over the narrator's mind-- the narrator who wrote the perfect tweet "can a dog be twins" and who makes her way in and out of meatspace and digital space with anxious disturbed ease . . . and then-- in the second half of the story-- reality intrudes-- the event is based on something that happened to Patricia Lockwood and her family-- and I won't spoil the way reality intrudes, but it rips her from the absurdity and obsession of the internet into a beautiful, profound, tragic everpresent now . . . but more important than the theme is the writing, it's wild, profane, funny and mesmerizing:
The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small . . . How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake up at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe getting numb for two months because you borrowed shoes to a friend's wedding; Thursday; October; "She's Like the Wind" in a dentist's office; driver's license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom, touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence . . .
so check it out-- I read it in a weekend-- it's certainly something different, and pretty much the opposite of the last book I read, Tana French's The Searcher, which is grounded in a rural setting, the internet mainly absent except as a villain to corrupt the youth . . . Lockwood's book is something completely different.
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