Patricia Lockwood, "No One Is Talking About This" (2021)

 

No One is Talking About This is an ironic title, but ironic in a tricksy ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ sort of way—because the novel is about all the stuff people talk about all the time on Twitter et al, but also about how this isn’t really talking. Which is to say: it's about the way the ‘this’ people talk about all the time isn’t the actual This. This? I’ll come back to that.

So, yes: Twitter. ‘This hellsite’ we call it. Is it hell? ‘Not hell,’ says Patricia Lockwood’s narrator, ‘but some fluorescent room with eternally outdated magazines where they waited to enter the memory of history, paging through a copy of Louisiana Parent or Horse Illustrated.’ She calls Twitter ‘The Portal’ (presumably names have been changed for legal &c). To be precise, ‘The Portal’ is not just Twitter; it's everything online, especially everything to which people who are Extremely Online devote their time. But the first half of Lockwood's novel reads like a Twitter feed, and that's what interests me here.

No One is Talking About This is about ‘The Portal’ and about Real Life, and disposes itself into two parts, one for each. The first, which I enjoyed the most—atomised and tweetsaturated as my consciousness doubtless is—reproduces something of the drip-drip-drip, or smack-smack-smack, of being on Twitter all day. There’s no real story, the characters can only dimly be discerned behind the narrator’s droll, weary, rat-paw-on-the-pellet-switch persona. It’s bitty, but designedly so, and although the actual paragraphs are, taken one by one, hit and miss, I found the overall effect fascinating and striking, a kind of textual pointillism that ended up achieving a strange and compelling effect.

Then there’s a second part: the protagonist’s niece is born with ‘Proteus syndrome’, a kind of elephantiasis that causes excessive and sometimes disfiguring tissue growth. The narrator loves her niece, and the situation drags her away from the ephemerazone of the internet.

“I just don't want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted—what?—to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!”

It’s well-written and moving, this Part 2; though I want to dwell on Part 1. But before I do that, a brief personal note. This isn’t exactly by way of ‘full disclosure’; I don’t know Lockwood, don’t have a review-dog in the fight, and haven’t read her first book, the memoir Priestdaddy, though I read a number of praising reviews. Her Parts 1 and 2 jar together somewhat awkwardly, and I take this to be deliberate. My current novel Purgatory Mount (available from all good bookshops) is likewise laminated out of two deliberately contrasting narratives, so obviously I’m not averse to writers doing interesting things with juxtaposition. More strikingly, in the coincidence derby, my next novel is also a novel about Twitter. Because it’s science fiction, in my novel Twitter (which I call ‘The This’, names having been changed for legal &c &c) may or may not be a nascent hive-mind poised to amalgamate all of humanity into a Borg-like synthesis. 

My point is that Lockwood’s two-ply novel, by juxtaposing her ‘Portal’ and ‘Real Life’, works to suggest that the former is atomising and deracinating the latter, whilst at the same time suggesting that the latter still has unifying and indeed transcendent potential. My ‘Thissy’ novel tends, I think, to suggest the opposite: Twitter only looks like it’s atomising. In fact its massively unifying: it’s ‘Life’ that is increasingly scattered, isolated, rootless. Social media glom us into one alter- and therefore self-hating blob. I do not like or trust the unifying tug. ‘Join us’ they chant, and I’ll whisper … ‘no.’ 

 Still, I enjoyed No One is Talking About This very much. Lockwood has a knack for the Twitter idiom she is inhabiting, and is especially good in finding a tone that snarks in a way that might be left-ish or right-ish, twoke or wingnutty, and is likely to irritate partisans of either wing:

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.

Revolutions—I mean actual Bolshevikky political revolutions—require above all commitment. Commitment and solidarity. Twitter is hospitable to neither.

Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.

The novel is also about Trump, of course:

Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now. … The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been true of all dictators. Absurdism, she thought. Suddenly all those Russian novels where a man turns into a teaspoonful of blackberry jam at a country house began to make sense.

We’re tempted to retort: really? Trump is clownish—although perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s a carnival barker. Idi Amin clowned about, and Mussolini aimed for Caesarian dignity and hit pompous-ridiculous, Alexi Sayle in jackboots, which is certainly clownish. But there was nothing funny about Pol Pot, and though Stalin could be avuncular and Hitler sometimes smiled neither clowned. Big Brother is watching you, not capering for your entertainment. Or I suppose that’s Lockwood’s point. That things have changed. Big Brother found it not only impossible to stay on the far side of the one-sided viewscreen, he found it actually advantageous to be out in front of the camera with the rest of us.

Still, there are I think a few things Lockwood gets wrong, or not quite right, about our current—what shall we call it? predicament? Take this:

The amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous and the implications not yet known. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening?

But Twitter is not other people’s diaries, and the first half of No One is Talking About This does not read like a diary. This novel is a much more striking, and disconcerting, thing, I think. It’s the unending stream of other people’s apothegms. It is the aphoristic apocalypse. 

The main thing that distinguishes Lockwood’s fictional recreation of that aphoristic discourse is that her aphorisms are, by and large, witty and perceptive, where most of Twitter is either massively banal or else massively angry—although almost always angry in a banal, blinkered, hermetic kind of way.

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.

How dare you reveal you've been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?

“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.

As she began to type, “Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.

Excellent stuff.

Reading this made me think about the aphoristic style more generally. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’m tempted to compare the kind of thing Lockwood is doing with Nietzsche. I’ve read reviews of No One is Talking About This that complain the first part is not only very inside-track Twitter, but very mid-period Trump-era inside-track Twitter. Which is to say: it’s liable to date quickly and catastrophically. That it's full of references that require debilitatingly specific context to work, a you-had-to-be-there quality (the fatberg, above, say). That may be true, though it’s also true, of course, of Nietzsche. We extract ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ and the like from his corpus as if that’s the characteristic Nietzschean aphorism, when many more of them are, as it might be: ‘Goethe has represented in “Antonio” the scientific spirit in man as an object of provocation for all Tassos’—doubtless snappy and hilarious to an 1870s German, less so today.

There are several ways of reading Nietzsche’s aphoristic style. Perhaps (say some) his aphorisms develop the tradition's pedagogic form (since, historically speaking, aphorisms have generally been boiled-down and memorable forms of some principle or observation to be memorised) into something more exploratory, a way of reasoning with oneself and inviting the reader to exercise her own reasoning faculties unpacking and developing the thought. Others—this is the whole Blanchot and Derrida way of reading Nietzsche—argue that he was drawn to the aphorism because it is incomplete, fragmentary, because individually and in larger accumulations it deconstructs continuity and logical argumentative development, previously the mainstays of philosophical writing. A labyrinth. Blanchot compares Nietzsche to Heraclitus (whose fragmentariness is an aleatory artefact of time’s depredations, of course, not an intentional textual strategy; but that doesn’t stop Blanchot seeing Nietzsche’s aphorisms as being akin). Derrida goes further, taking all of Nietzsche’s oeuvre as consisting of separated, discontinuous sentences, such, famously, or infamously if you dislike Derrida, as the one he chanced upon in Nietzsche's notebook, in quotation marks and without further context: “I forgot my umbrella.”

What I want to suggest here is something a little different. I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms, as, that is to say, a text in the Nietzschean tradition. And, as a regular user I know that from time to time a tweet does hit the sweet spot that Lockwood captures so well in her Part 1: a tweet pops into your feed that is funny, or clever, or thought-provoking, or poignardesque, or even Nietzschean. But most of Twitter, the overwhelming majority of it, is drivel. Chaff. Irritable gestures, smugnesses, narcissisms, randomness, phatic fumbles of the finger on the iPhone typepad. But still all aphorisms. The form of the website mandates that. Which gives us a huge unspooling aphoristic megatext that is neither pedagogically worthwhile, metaphysically tantalising nor even deconstructivistically labyrinthine. That is, rather, just banal. Banal on an epic scale. A huge ongoing drama in which the aphorism has become the main vehicle for the radical, collective banalism of life today. Perhaps the reason ‘we’ (for certain metrics of ‘we’) are so addicted to Twitter is precisely because it satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality rather than an aphorism of profundity; an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses, that glues us together in our shared pettiness. There is something more important than this, something bigger, and Lockwood's Part 2 deals with that. Indeed, I'd hazard a guess that it was Part 2 that persuaded this year's judges to longlist the novel for the Man Booker. But it's Lockwood's Part 1 that really interests me: more apropos, perhaps even more mimetic. LOL. WinkyFaceEmoji. HashtagReadThisNovel.