City Pages Review: Twitter fame, the meaning of life and abortion rights
Since the curtains came down on 2019, many of us have spent more time inside our homes than we had ever imagined. The pandemic has thrown up political and social change rarely seen in peacetime, but living through and talking about Covid has consumed incredible amounts of oxygen, often to the exclusion of other worthy issues.
In a series of reviews released this week, CityAM columnists have handpicked books to help make sense of our lives outside of our living room.
No-one Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Review by Eliot Wilson.
Patricia Lockwood is a poet. And it shows.
No-one Is Talking About This is an extraordinary explosion of words and fragments, sometimes like a snowstorm and sometimes like hard, unforgiving hailstones. Ostensibly the narration of an internet celebrity (“the portal” in Lockwood’s words), it follows the protagonist through her observations on life as perceived through the portal, and then, in part two, the tragedy of her sister giving birth to a baby with Proteus Syndrome.
There is little secret that the narrator and Lockwood herself are one. From the intensely Catholic father figure (the author’s father is a priest) and the lack of a college education to the listless but addictive engagement with the world as shown to her by the internet, the identification is strong; Lockwood’s early fame came almost entirely through Twitter, being the only author to appear twice in The Atlantic’s “The Best Tweets of All Time” in 2013, and she was a leading member of the Weird Twitter movement.
The first half of the book is light on plot; we see what one reviewer called a “kaleidoscope” of words as Lockwood/the narrator muses on existence. “In the fifties”, the narrator snarls, “I would have belonged to a milkshake gang and had a nickname like Ratbite.” You know exactly what she means.
And sometimes these epigrams of the ether are pointed. She skewers tedious verbiage about modern culture when she observes that “all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of the old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement”. That certainly made me look back guiltily at some of my writing.
The shock value is balanced between the desire to analyse crisply and the desire to outrage. As the narrator considers her mutual relationship of need and desire with the portal, she concludes that she feels wanted by it in good times; but “in baser ones, she saw herself bent over, on her knees.”
Part two of the novel moves into more profound territory. The realisation that the narrator’s sister’s unborn child is damaged, and will have a short life if she lives at all, allows Lockwood to explore nothing short of the meaning of life. When the baby is born, despite her challenges, and survives, the narrator becomes devoted to her, and that devotion changes her perspective on the world. She begins to imagine the child as a strange but higher being, calm and observant, on earth for only a short time but seeking to reassure everyone that things will be well.
Underlying the narrative, however, is the question of abortion.
The action takes place in Ohio, which in April 2019 passed the so-called Heartbeat Bill, preventing abortion after a heartbeat was detected in the foetus and representing one of the most severe restrictions on termination in the US. So when the narrator’s sister discovers her baby is suffering from Proteus Syndrome, a termination is simply not an option. This avoids a conflict with their religious and conservative father, but he too finds himself in a gut-wrenching dilemma at the fact that Obamacare, which he hates, is paying the young girl’s health costs.
No-one Is Talking About This is a slender book, not much more than 200 pages. It is not closely printed, nor does it feel dense. But it is an extraordinarily intense read, as the words and syllables burst in front of your eyes and the tightly knotted moral questions become more pressing. It is quirky and mannered, and readers will either find that groove straight away, or may never do so.
If you want to wrestle with life’s biggest problems, but enjoy someone who treats words as malleable ornaments and delights, you will react as I did. And for a while, you will not look at prose in the same way again.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99).