The Booker Blog: No One is Talking About This

The book is beautiful, but the cover gives you very little idea as to what this novel is about.

Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This contains just about every joke millennials have shared on the internet since we first logged on via our parent’s dial-up.

No One is Talking About This reads like the Twitter feed of your wittiest friend. The nameless protagonist is addicted to the internet, which she refers to as the portal, where she has gone viral for posting “can a dog be twins?”. An important question that regrettably is never answered through the course of the novel. You may not have read this book yet, but that joke matches its tone exactly. Could I have written this book? No. But do I have everything that this book is made up of? The memes, internet humour, political knowledge and anger? Absolutely.

This novel is written in a format reminiscent of social media posts. Each unnamed chapter is made up of paragraph-long snippets, little moments of the protagonist's life and thoughts on the world around them. And memes. Lots of memes. This novel is so current, I wonder if someone my parent's age or someone with more of a life off the internet would get as much enjoyment from it. Like Bewilderment, another Booker-shortlisted novel, there is a “dictator” ruling the United States where laws governing women’s bodies are becoming increasingly restrictive and the fear of total climate collapse lies at the edge of everyone’s psyche. I find it unnerving how Trump and climate change seem to now be so omnipresent in fiction.

Social media has a reputation for being vain and shallow and a lot of what Lockwood writes about in No One is Talking About This plays to that reputation. She explores the silly little jokes that we make on social media platforms and how that humour has made its way into our real-world lives. My favourite example of this is when the protagonist talks about her cat. “Over one hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow. Now her cat was called Dr Butthole. There was no way out of it.” Does anyone else remember when the internet named a British research vessel Boaty McBoatface? Dr Butthole is the perfect example of that type of internet humour that has slowly spread to the outside world.

“When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”

However, this book also touches on how important but ineffective social media has been for us during uncertain times. She discusses politics on the portal and white peoples’ sudden interest in discussing injustice. “When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.” Remember last year when Instagram was awash in black boxes that were being posted in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement? And then the next day the internet returned to normal and nothing had changed. The protagonist vents her anger in the portal after the dictator is elected. She briefly gets banned and then is back to it as soon as her ban is lifted. She is cognisant of the futility of her actions, but what else can she do? How many of us have turned to social media when we want to scream out our frustration over the state of the world?

I read half of this book out loud to my partner and sent funny snippets to my sister. This book was joy and heartbreak — I really enjoyed reading it. It almost seemed as if this book was half-written for me, a salty millennial who spends way too much time on Twitter.

That being said, I did feel like this book had flaws. While I found the first half to be hilarious and the second half to be heart-breaking, I found the novel to be somewhat disjointed. What was the purpose of the first part other than to make humorous social commentary? The second half is upsetting, emotional and raw yet it still tries to keep the same tone as the beginning of the novel. This didn’t work for me. I understand tackling serious topics with humour but there is a balance that needs to be met and I felt that in keeping this tone Lockwood took away some of the emotional impact of what she was writing about. This book should have made me cry, but I didn’t until I read the acknowledgements where Lockwood discloses some of the source material.

I don’t think this book will win the Booker, though I am glad that it has received so much recognition and I really enjoyed reading it. No One is Talking About This was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. To have your first novel receive such recognition is quite the feat and I look forward to reading whatever Lockwood comes out with next.