No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood [Review]

This is a book in a new genre called “Internet bad”. It is quite similar to Fake Accounts, another popular book in this genre, in the sense that it vaguely alludes to some negative aspects of social media in a reductionist manner, and has also decided that plot has no place in a book.

Let’s be clear; I’m not alone in thinking that this is little more than a collection of some tweets, often times not even remotely original ones. Anyone who has been active on the Internet in the last few years should recognise many of the references, and they weren’t all that funny the first time I read them on twitter three years ago so I found this quite tedious to read. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of experience you’d have if you didn’t understand the references. It sort of reminded me of those books that all YouTube vloggers were releasing a decade ago: a collection of loosely related concepts, full of quirky references and jokes usually unashamedly nabbed from other people. 

The stop/start nature of the format, especially in the first part, was so jarring as an experience for me that I felt strangely claustrophobic: your brain is trying to make sense of what you’re reading and how it is relevant to the story (or possibly a wider message), it’s trying to categorise and store information while pulling out previously retained information to connect or compare it to, by which point your eyes are already reading three tweets down. It becomes exhausting after a chapter.

The erratic formatting means the reader is left to speculate the potential meanings and evaluations on behalf of the author, coming up with suggestions as to the points she is making because they are so successfully hidden. This is personal preference too, but I’d rather not read a book where I am using my existing bias to consciously or subconsciously shape what I think the author is telling me into something that my subconscious finds palatable. 

These are the kinds of books that meant I grew up disliking reading — intentional abstruseness, conceited intellectualism, and forcing the reader to guess what the author is trying to say rather than being clear and letting the reader evaluate and assess what they’re actually saying. For me, it’s more of a chore than it is an enjoyable experience.

She does make a go at social and political commentary, but I don’t think it’s anything particularly new, and I cant think of a less appropriate way to go about it. These points in themselves also appear as little more than random thoughts, random tweets, that often times bare no relevance to each other. I’m left thinking that the author has a lot to say but is maybe incapable of organising these points into something coherent, or she tried something experimental that for me didn’t enhance the point(s) she was trying to make.

Some may know I have been writing a book for a while now. It’s difficult, and if anything it has made me appreciate the books that I read, even the ones that I don’t like and I find are flawed, because converting your thoughts to a finished product on a piece of paper in front of you is an achievement which not many can boast. I am then disappointed and encouraged in equal measure by this book. On the one hand I think this is really not great, and a disservice to all those who have published a book in the last year that were not shortlisted for the Booker Prize. On the other hand, it makes me optimistic that this writing malarkey isn’t as difficult as I thought.