The way in which the internet’s social culture shapes language and humor is one of Lockwood’s major subjects. This is broad Menippean satire lurking beneath a nauseating crust of animated GIFs, Wojak memes, and tweets. Best of all, she’s got a keen, very weird sense of humor. Her curiosity is curatorial, even connoisseurial. Lockwood is a sponge for the wunderkammer-meets-circus sideshow energy that the internet supplies. At first, the reader may think, "I, too, could empty my Notes app into a Word document." But there is an inventive - linguistically and otherwise - intelligence at work here, and it commands our undivided attention. It won’t escape comparisons to Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson, though it’s more fun than either of them.
It’s fragmentary, after a prevailing fashion, one uniquely suited to our heavily mediated existence.
No One Is Talking About This isn’t, in fact, really even a novel in the usual sense. Its tone is fascinated, almost disbelieving, and occasionally concerned. But Lockwood’s novel is neither an indictment of social media nor an encomium to it but something uneasily in between. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.” She returns repeatedly to the online sphere’s punitive character, its multiplying rules (“Were we just never to say that someone ‘inclined her head like a geisha’ ever again?”) and pious debates (“whether you could say the word retard on a podcast”) inflicted on us by the virtual heirs to the hall monitor and the tattletale. “Every day their attention must turn,” Lockwood writes, “like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Her narrator is invited to speak or sit on panels about the “new communication,” and she gamely does so despite seeming more skeptical of it than her audiences are.
Lockwood and her third-person narrator are niche internet celebrities, the former for tweeting, “So is Paris any good or not” at the Paris Review and for a viral poem called “Rape Joke,” the latter for a sublimely dumb tweet: “Can a dog be twins?” Lockwood is also the author of a memoir, Priestdaddy, about growing up with a Catholic priest for a father. “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew,” Lockwood writes, “and five years later believe in a flat earth.” We’re gluttons for distraction, wherever it may lead. Late in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, a novel about being “extremely online,” a trainer explains that in order to be certified as a service dog, “the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and ignore it.” It’s hard to miss the demoralizing parallel: We are the dog, the greasy bucket is the internet, and we just can’t help ourselves. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood.
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