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To truly appreciate Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, the latest in a flourishing genre of online living experience fiction, you’ll need a working understanding of what is intangibly funny on the Internet. If you don’t inherently know what a meme is, you won’t have a clue what’s going on.
Lockwood is an Internet person herself. Dubbed the Poet Laureate of Twitter, she wrote one of the first poems to go viral – a captivating commentary titled “Rape Joke” – in 2013, and she is a pioneer of Weird Twitter, a subculture of internet humor which is irreverent and vaguely punctuated (example: “arparisreview Just like Paris is good or not ”). Lockwood’s work defies traditional boundaries: she’s a cultural critic and feature film writer, author of two books of poetry, a bestselling memoir – Priestdaddy (2017) – about his Catholic education in the Midwest, and now Nobody talks about it.
Like Lockwood, the novel’s unnamed protagonist has built up huge success in what she calls, apocalyptically, “The Portal.” What started with a viral post asking “Can A Dog Be Twins” quickly turned into a career in which she travels the world explaining internet culture to people who are themselves deep online. She is married to an equally sardonic husband and has a cat named Dr. Butthole. She spends her waking hours scrolling and can no longer feel her first finger.
The book is short, around 200 pages, and broken up into handfuls of phrases that tend to follow a certain formula, starting with a philosophical reflection that is interspersed with a sizzling, bizarre, or funny punchline. On the character’s shifting political views, for example: “Slowly, slowly she found herself evolving into a position so philosophical that not even Jesus could have held her: that she had to hate capitalism while loving them. editing of films set in department stores. “
Lockwood expertly replicates the experience of sifting through disparate moments on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter, past memes that deliberately move your eye around an image to strike the joke at the right time. At the end of the first part, the player is exhausted by the volume of the hot takes. As her heroine puts it: the portal “had once been the place where you looked like yourself. Little by little, it had become the place where we resembled each other, due to the erosion of wind or water on a self not as firm as stone. She asks, “Why are we all writing like this now?”
Then comes the second part: much darker and somehow a great relief. A family medical emergency – her sister’s new baby has a degenerative disease, diagnosed before birth – pulls Lockwood’s protagonist out of the portal and returns to real life. From there, the novel becomes human, more loving, an ode to life and the fleetingness of time. “Something about the rawness of living with the baby was like the rawness of the journey, the way it opened up you to clear blue nerves. You were the five senses that swept through an unknown street.
Half online, half cheaper, Nobody talks about it takes us on a complex journey that ends with a simple moral: real life matters more. After 100 pages of ironic and maddening irony, the reader longs for it and wins it. The question that persists, however, is: how long until we are inevitably sucked?
Nobody talks about it, by Patricia Lockwood, Bloomsbury Circus, RRP £ 14.99, 224 pages
Lilah raptopoulos is the co-host of the FT cultural podcast Call for culture and the American head of public engagement of the FT
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