‘Are the same! No matter where you go!’ But later, taking an afternoon out of the portal to read Virginia Woolf, she realized that that must have been it, the lighthouse the family sails to on the final page.

“On the Isle of Skye, she and her husband ate langoustines at a restaurant overlooking a long gray ridge of rock with a lighthouse at the tip of it, and laughed at the herds of tourists who insisted on visiting lighthouses wherever they went. Early on, the narrator describes a visit to Scotland: The Modernists loom curiously large in No One Is Talking About This. It ends after the funeral, with the narrator delivering ‘The Communal Mind’ at the British Museum, before having her phone stolen at a club. The book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Lockwood’s own niece who died of Proteus syndrome after being diagnosed in utero.

The baby lives for a total of six months and one day, and Lockwood relates the death and funeral arrangements in deeply moving detail.

Where Part One is a Twitter travelogue that explicitly scorns the idea of plot, early in Part Two the narrator learns that her pregnant sister’s child has Proteus syndrome, and rushes to Ohio to care for her and eventually the newborn baby. “‘What a cute little pair of panties,’ her mother said as she emerged from the laundry room, holding up a pair of her brother’s military silkies, which were the bright trumpeting yellow of the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and embroidered with the words NO STEP ON SNEK.”īut a little after the halfway point, the book carefully pivots. My favourite of these moments is the following: It was about texting, hearts for eyes, bad kisses with their terrible bristles, porn moving in vague blobs through the body, how social protocol constitutes another arm of perception… and how men sucked, of course!”Īs with the original piece, Lockwood has a fantastic eye for the memeable phrase, and a poetic instinct for juxtaposing the Online with the IRL. “Everyone was reading the same short story. Laura Adamczyk at The AV Club describes the novel as “a greatest and worst hits of the 2017 internet,” and I certainly felt a horrified recognition at the events of Charlottesville (“When the car plowed into a crowd of protestors at a Nazi rally, she was there”) and the eruption over Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’: Part One is a novelisation of Twitter (here called “the portal”) interspersed with the life of an unnamed digital culture connoisseur, who “had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins?” This section is a reworking of Lockwood’s excellent 2019 talk/essay ‘The Communal Mind,’ and like that piece, it’s a dizzying kaleidoscope of delight, disgust, and painful, painful memories.

It is also a novel about family, grief, and caring for a baby with Proteus syndrome. No One Is Talking About This is a novel about being Extremely Online.

No one is talking about this book