Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This ***

I picked up No One is Talking About This because it appeared on several "Best of 2021" lists, described as a novel with a distinctive narrative voice. Lockwood's style reminded me a lot of Jenny Offill's, with this book being especially similar to Weather.

In the first half, Lockwood effectively portrays the modern experience of spending so much time browsing the internet. The random flow of subjects ("pictures of breakfast in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner..."); the flattening of moral distinctions ("Sometimes the subject as a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole"); the insincerity ("the generation spent most of its time making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis"); ultimate goal of posting things that are funny ("they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny"); the FOMO when you're offline for too long "(For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn't she? She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?").

Unfortunately, Lockwood also succeeds in capturing the fragmentation of the online experience. She regularly has cleverly worded insights, but they are disconnected and don't add up to anything deeper. 

In the second half, our heroine's sister gives birth to a baby with Proteus syndrome. Engaging with the miracle baby, who will never experience connection, drags her into the offline world, celebrating each little achievement and feeling untethered because, per the title, the internet can't tell her how to deal with the situation. This section reminded me of the Lorrie Moore story "People Like That are the Only People Here," which similarly revolves around a critically ill infant.

(What does it mean that I describe my experience of this book with references by other books? Surely it reflects on the Lockwood's theme of mediated vs unmediated experience?)