Book Review Contest Runner Up: Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This
by Ethan Spiegelman
Patricia Lockwood Mostly Wastes Her Rich Portrait of Trump-era Twitter
It seems we are in the waning days of the now eerily quiet, tumbleweed-strewn social network Twitter dot com and, therefore, it is a good time to reflect on when it was at its most vibrant and relevant.
That is, the 2016-20 period where a swirling cocktail of irony and progressive politics was supercharged by Donald Trump’s election and constant presence on the platform, creating a perpetual, immensely influential online conversation.
You can find a portrait of that Twitter in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, a novel from 2021 that does a great job of evoking how intense, terrible, and alive Trump-era Twitter was… and an awful job understanding what it all meant.
The novel’s strengths are mostly confined to its first part.
The protagonist is an influential member of what she refers to as “the portal,” clearly a stand-in for (Weird/Progressive) Twitter, after first becoming known for a post “Can a dog be twins?”
There isn’t so much a plot in this part as worldbuilding constructed through fragmented short paragraphs. It is writing meant to sound like tweets while also being so off-kilter and cryptic that the reader experiences it as a sort of blurred, lossy compression version of actual Twitter.
She paints the incoherent political radicalism that members adopted to fit in: “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.”
If anyone understands what the bit about Jesus and department stores means, by all means, tell me! Much of the book is like this. It sort of makes sense, when you squint, but also not quite and I think it’s meant to work as an uncanny substitute for the type of pithy irony with a kernel of truth that Twitter at its best offered.
Regardless, Lockwood does an amazingly complete job documenting the rich, bizarre online society that arose for a few years then disappeared.
Including the endemic hyperboles: “Politics! The trouble was they had a dictator now…” (referring to Trump).
The clubby-ness. The racialized and gendered divisiveness. The waves of backlash and counter-backlash that knocked against each other until the conversation that had inspired them disappeared.
And, of course, the capricious, cruel nature of cancel culture or whatever else you care to call it: “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 a someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”
I could quote quite a bit more and I genuinely enjoyed Lockwood’s evocation of that era of Twitter, which she does ably and with the requisite electricity to feel it. Easily, it’s the most fun part of the novel.
Unfortunately, she glides over any effects the online world has on the material one and, moreover, embeds this portrait in an irritatingly hackneyed plot.
In the second part, the unbearably online protagonist is knocked out of her virtual reality haze after her younger sister becomes pregnant with an infant who has a rare and deadly genetic disease. Lockwood proceeds with paced sadness as the protagonist disengages from social media – which fails to represent the “entirety of human experience” – and dives into care for her sister and niece through the birth, short life, and mourning.
Whatever differences exist between parenthood and the protagonist’s situation are collapsed; she takes on such an active role that her sister says post-mortem, “You were her mother too.” And in case it’s not clear that Lockwood is trying to establish the contrast between the protagonist’s ironic, social media- drenched life and parenthood, there’s this paragraph: “Any kids? One of the nurses asked her. No. She hesitated so long she could feel her hair growing. A cat. Named Dr. Butthole.”
It’s hard to think of a more irritating, retrograde cliché than the old chestnut that the opposite of frivolity is becoming a parent and the opposite of parenthood is arrested development. I’m not writing this as some anti-natalist curmudgeon. I like babies, think it’s great when people have them, and hope to have some myself one day. I’ll even admit that some of the writing in this part is moving which, in fairness, is based on Lockwood’s life. But, my god! There are other, less worn out, less loaded ways for the protagonist to discover the Real World!
I could forgive this framing if the author understood that the protagonist’s wasn’t emerging from nothing – her online life has and had consequences.
There’s plenty of evidence in the first part that the protagonist is neglecting her relationships. She guilts her husband for using a sex toy on her they both enjoyed and, on another night, feels so distant sleeping next to him that she asks him not to touch her. In another scene, her sister sends her sexy pre-pregnancy photos she had taken and the protagonist asks if she can post one on the portal as content.
It would drive me up a wall to be close to someone so lost to internet discourse! But the protagonist’s IRL relationships suffer not. Even before her sister’s pregnancy, she is as close to her family as ever and her husband remains enchanted and delighted by her, just “10 percent unhappy that he had married a madwoman.”
This is a personal story, not a communal one, of an internet-poisoned woman’s awakening from an extremely online coma. And the people in her material life greet her upon her return as if her disappearance had no effect on them.
It seems lost on both author and protagonist that this era of social media mattered, both to the people around them and to society at large.
It wasn’t all a joke. I knew people who became obnoxious, persona-obsessed bores just as the protagonist seems to become. Democratic politicians got boxed into untenable positions on healthcare and immigration, paving the way for the only viable presidential candidate to be an old man with pre-internet instincts who may very well lose to Trump this year because of his age. Traditional media narratives became shaped around social media ones. Twitter shined a light on police brutality and killings of Black men and launched a massive movement – then sprinted down a rabbit hole of backlashes and arguments about symbolism, driving the movement into oblivion without accomplishing any meaningful change to federal law.
I don’t want to sound like I think it was all bad. I consider, for example, the #metoo movement to be a crowning achievement, a necessary cultural awakening to the ubiquity of sexual violence with lasting social effects that spawned many significant laws. You are free to disagree with me on any of these points and to take a warmer or colder view of what social media changed.
But No One Is Talking About This paints Trump-era social media as an elaborately adorned, frivolous timesuck, an isolated, ridiculous world that the protagonist is absorbed in until adult responsibilities intrude. It was often absurd, but it was also impactful. It was real life, too.
Everything is.