The first novel by a digital laureate
No One Is Talking About This. By Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead Books; 224 pages; $25. Bloomsbury Circus; £14.99
WOULD THERE be a Patricia Lockwood without the internet? Once described as “the poet laureate of Twitter”, she belongs to a cadre of writers whose careers can be charted in viral online moments: a video of her reading a poem she wrote called “Rape Joke”; a daring essay on the novels of John Updike; even a feted tweet, sent to the Paris Review, a literary magazine, asking, “So is Paris any good or not?”
“No One Is Talking About This”, her first novel, is about how a collective internet addiction moulds and changes the way people think. The implication is that, although its American author might indeed exist without the web and the intellectual contortions it encourages, she would not be the “Patricia Lockwood” her admirers know today.
The unnamed narrator is a compulsive web user, and the novel is written in zippy gobbets that imitate the truncated thought-processes cultivated by Twitter. In front of her screen, she feels the world “pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk”. After the election of Donald Trump, though, she senses something toxic and strangulating in the...