Mind Picker: No One Is Talking About This

It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot coffee and then went, “AHHHHH,” like George Clooney on ER, like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”

No One Is Talking About This begins so achingly hip and of the moment — written like and about a string of (sometimes familiar) memes and tweets that attempt to capture the experience of they who mindlessly consta-scroll through their various feeds — and as shallow and as meaningless as a life described thusly may seem, the novel takes a swerve in its second part: with a family crisis (apparently one based on author Patricia Lockwood’s own experience) serving to remind the unnamed narrator of what is really important, her life pivots from one of inanity to one of deep meaning. In its overall construction, I found this to be a bit like Brave New World come to pass, but in its details, the midnovel swerve was incredibly radical in a way that no one is talking about. I have to say that the first part — in which, for example, the narrator becomes internet famous for tweeting, “Can a dog be twins?” and then proceeds to tour the world to speak on panels about internet culture — did not really engage me; nothing about “Can a dog be twins” is amusing or provocative to me; I would not stop to read that sentence twice, let alone tweet cry emojis at it in appreciation. So while the first part had me imagining that this novel might be more meaningful to my daughters — on the cusp between Millenials and Gen Z, they are infinitely more immersed in the tiktok-insta-twitterverse than I am — the second part seemed designed to provoke them at the level of their most deeply held personal beliefs and I could not imagine them following where the narrative leads (even if it represents the author’s own lived experience). I understand that’s kind of vague, and I’ll be more specific behind spoiler tags, but I’ll say again that this didn’t really feel aimed at me — there were some nice sentences, but it felt mostly like in-jokes that failed to intrigue me — and the novel’s most radical aspect is the one that no one is talking about. I have no idea if this book will one day be regarded as a perfect time capsule of our moment or if its content was passé the moment it was sent to print.

“You could write it,” she had said to the man in Toronto, “someone could write it,” but all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.

I did not find it particularly charming that the narrator only refers to the internet (or is it specifically Twitter?) as “the portal”, or that she only refers to the otherwise unnamed president of the United States as “the dictator”, but I can recognise that Lockwood engagingly uses her short passages format to experientially capture the feeling of a social media feed while writing about such feeds. The narrator finds herself a slave to the portal — wanting to be aware of all the latest content while trying to create her own next viral post — and the memes and tweets she reads/creates/reacts to are generally vulgar and shallow and heavily ironic, all serving to create a group of people who think exactly the same way: she learns a “funnier” way to laugh, who to cancel (war criminals but also people who make guacamole wrong), and she happily locksteps along with all the latest groupthink:

The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”

As she travels to the various panels on internet culture around the world, she meets a fellow influencer who admits that his own balls are always somewhere in the pictures he posts online and she laments the fact that she had been banned from the portal for two days after posting a picture of herself crouched over and dripping period blood onto a sculpture of pipe cleaners (labelled THE TREE OF LIBERTY) after the election of “the dictator”, and this type of content is treated as normal and expected. But then the family crisis begins and this novel becomes something else entirely. (*Spoilers from here*) The narrator’s sister is happily pregnant with her first child but it is discovered that the fetus has Proteus syndrome, a condition that causes an overgrowth of skin and bone, and although a team of doctors determines that it is unlikely the baby will be born alive (and if she is alive, it won’t be for long or with any kind of awareness), the greater danger is to the mother’s life: with a rapidly overgrowing skull, giving a natural birth to this baby could rip the mother apart. Unfortunately, emboldened by the election of the dictator, the governor of Ohio has passed a draconian pro-life bill that not only criminalises abortion but also prevents early labour inducement. And although the narrator is outraged and offers to drive her sister to Las Vegas or whatever it takes to do the medically necessary interventions, the sister decides to resign herself to her fate and gives birth to a live baby who immediately captures the hearts and minds of her family. The narrator is enchanted by the baby’s middle distance stare, her giggles at being kissed on the tummy, her engagement with the world on her own terms:

“She only knows what it is to be herself,” they kept repeating to each other. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and body ought to be able to do. When the neurologist, in that first-ever meeting, had said gently that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three, she almost turned the table over on her, because who needed to count to three? Look what counting to three had gotten us. I’m warning you.

The baby only lives for six months, but no one who knows her regrets that she was allowed those months of life and I submit that in our internet-dominated lives of shallow and banal content, where there is a generally progressive ethos that assures us there is only one correct way to look at complicated issues, there is no more radical course for a novel to take than a pro-life one. I described this novel to one of my daughters yesterday, and as soon as I got to the part where the baby was born alive and the narrator falls in love with her, my daughter — in the wake of the new Texas whistleblower site — had her back up and said that she would throw such a novel against the wall. I explained that this narrative is apparently based on the author’s own experience with her short-lived niece — she presumably did not set out to write a pro-life novel — but, as that is effectively what Lockwood did write, my daughter said it sounds like proselytising and ought to be shelved under Christianity instead of General Fiction. And when I further explained that my own biggest amazement is that I have read zero reviews that remark on the pro-life mid-novel swerve, my daughter agreed that that is strange: The first half of this book, in form and content, seems written for someone like this lovely, big-hearted, fiercely feminist daughter of mine, but nothing could have provoked her more than the direction the narrative eventually takes (even if it is based on lived experience) and no one is talking about that.

“I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”

So, yes, this is, generally, about remembering that real, authentic life happens off of the internet, but in its specifics, No One Is Talking About This is even more radical than that anodyne summation suggests. Even so, it didn’t really engage me (beyond wondering what my daughters would make of it) but it wasn’t a waste of time.