Monday night, February 8, 2021.
"A gorgeous metaphor for a communal life online": A school of surgeonfish in reef waters off the Maldives. Detail from a photo by Uxbona, via Wikipedia.
Variations of the phrase “no one is talking about this”, which, with conventional capitalization, is the title of a new novel about lives lived out online by Patricia Lockwood, appear all the time in my Twitter feed, as one Twitterer after another vents their anger, frustration, horror, or anguish that an issue they believe is of vital importance and needs immediate attention from the media so that politicians will notice and set to work right away solving the problem. Thing is, it’s usually the case that the reason no one is talking about it is that they’ve already talked about it, as a quick Google will show. The top ten items that the algorithm turns up will be links to articles and stories in which people have talked about this at length. The angry, frustrated, horrified, anguished Twitterers have made the mistake of thinking that what’s happening in their Twitter feeds is representative of more than what’s happening in their Twitter feeds and of thinking the world as it appears to them online is the world as it is.
One of my objects since I started writing for an online readership, sixteen and a years and four portals ago, has been to drive my readers offline and out of the virtual world back into the analog one. Read this book, watch this movie, was my constant theme, take a walk in the woods or at least a hike around the block; look at that bird, watch out for bears; grab your tool kit; enjoy the weather or, at any rate, get out into it long enough to know what you’re complaining about when you sit back down at your keyboard or take out your phone to complain about it: better yet, take out your phone and call a friend to complain about it. Study a real school of fish, instead of being a member of the school of fish you swim with online. And then use your own words when you blog, Facebook, tweet, instagram, TikTok, or substack about it.
Another object has been to use my own words myself and come up with my own jokes. I’m old enough to remember when that was a point of pride, and I’m proud to say I’ve succeeded in that. (Narrator: Not always.) So you can see why I’m looking forward to reading “No One Is Talking About This” and why I’ll be talking about it as soon as I do. What’s coming up aren’t more of my words. They’re the words of Claire Wills talking about “No One Is Talking About This” in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.
“Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. She is, like Lockwood herself, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends—all of whom appear in the novel—but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world online, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review....
“But what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.
Lockwood expects her reader to work hard. The novel is all about the importance of being in the know, and it won’t work unless we are prepared to join in, parsing the anecdotes. There is something very winning about Lockwood’s abundant faith not only that we can but that we will follow her. She jollies us along, leading us through the language and styles of ever more evolved platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), without explicitly naming any of them. She trusts us to keep up to speed, to catch meaning off the current vectors and to keep it circulating.
That passage is one of several in which Lockwood tries out labels (with exclamation marks!) for the kind of book she is writing: “The plot! That was a laugh.” What hope for storyline, when the novel simply follows the Lockwood character, an Internet obsessive, obsessing about the Internet? She scrolls, she showers, and she scrolls some more. She spends her time in bed engaged in “spellbound reading” of her phone—exactly the same reading that everybody else is doing. She posts, she messages, and she texts; her phone buzzes repeatedly in her pocket when she starts trending; she climbs onto stages in Australia and Japan and all over Europe and talks about the portal:
All around the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloud-bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?
She laughs, “Ahahaha!,” “the new and funnier way” to laugh. She knows to say “it me,” or “unbelievably me,” rather than “that’s just how I feel!” in response to a post about a warty frog, unutterably alone. She is absolutely in command of the language of the portal, and she writes about this command in discontinuous sections of prose that appear like lengthy tweets, separated by asterisks and gaps. Naturally she wonders about this style:
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote…
“Someone could write it. But it would have to be like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A social novel.
…It’s an odd ambition, when you think about it—to write a novel about the Internet. However much you jazz up the form you are folding new modes of communication back into old ones, and by mentioning Austen Lockwood wants us to notice this. The novel she has written is a hybrid beast: it is an arch descendant of Austen’s socio-literary style—a novel of observation, crossed with a memoir of a family crisis, and written as a prose poem, steeped in metaphor.
No One Is Talking About This does feature a plot, if not exactly a “plot!,” and the plot even belongs to a genre—the disenchanted bildungsroman. As Lockwood moves deeper inside the portal she becomes increasingly alienated from “real life,” increasingly “locked in” to the collective consciousness. Lab rats in a cage get a pellet of food when they hit a button, but all you get for living in the portal and playing the game is to be more of a rat. She looks back wistfully to a time when the portal appeared to serve people rather than the other way around. The idea of spending time in a chat room seems positively Edenic compared to the new world in which “every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”
A school of fish, seen from above—it’s a gorgeous metaphor for communal life online, and it points to a contradiction in this novel, in which Lockwood repeatedly discovers new ways of saying that we have lost new ways of saying things: “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.” You start by pinging an elastic band at the back of the class, and before you know it you are part of a gang, talking only to the people who talk exactly as you do, listening only to your own echo:
It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals…
The alternative to spouting the shared doctrine of your online community is to try to keep ahead of the portal itself. But it is such hard work, not just being an ordinary fish, but being the first fish to catch the light in a dart of new direction: “It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.” You can’t afford time off. She tries locking her phone in a safe, but that isn’t exactly self-control, and she very quickly folds. Eventually her husband diagnoses a “dead look” behind her eyes, just when she claims she is feeling most alive…
---from “Bildungsonline” by Clair Wills, from her review of “No One Is Talking About This” in the February 25, 2021 issue of the New York Review of books.
This reminds me of The Circle by Dave Eggars, and there must be dozens more out there. Everyone expects the Internet to Mean something, and no one çan quite figure out what, so they all fall back on alienation from "reality" while trying to invent a print syntax that emulates the fragmented free-association of "posts". Did novelists fret about television, or radio, or the telegraph like this?
This seems to tie in with the more general free-floating fear in the world. I think the one thing in America we all agree on is we are terrified of the future. Conservative see the loss of their privilege as the default of society, liberals think if the fascist terrorists don't get us global warming will. There used to be think pieces in magazines, and many science fiction stories, about the ever-increasing rate of change in our society, always portrayed as a problem. Maybe that's what has everyone spooked.
Posted by: CheezWhiz | Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 02:16 PM