no one is talking about this patricia lockwood

How big is the internet, exactly? Can we ever know all of it? This feeling of obscurity used to be the domain of nature what Wordsworth once described as “a portal in the sky.” Lockwood gives us, more simply, “the portal.” Lockwood grasps one of the most extraordinary tricks of the internet, which is its capacity to metamorphose billions of short, often brutish and haphazard utterances into something that feels immensely and solidly real a single entity, “the internet” a presence that overwhelms us with both wonder and despair. The chief virtue of the novel is how it transforms all that is ugly and cheap about online culture - the obsession with junk media the fragmentary and jerked presentation of content the mockery, the snark the postures, the polemics - into an experience of sublimity. “No One Is Talking About This” is, in part, a rebuttal to this vision of the internet as enabling a mean and cramped sort of art. That platform, as a mistrustful reviewer once complained, “ rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark,” inspiring poems like “ Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find,” or “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.” She has honed her craft on the internet, mainly on Twitter. Her prose rambles from animal gags to dirty talk to infinitely beautiful meditations on the nature of perception that deflate and turn absurd before they can turn philosophical. The most recent contender in this genre is Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This.” The author of two poetry collections and a memoir, “ Priestdaddy,” Lockwood is a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid by turns. They find ways, as the critic Mark McGurl puts it, “ to speak back to and against” their own conditions of existence. Such novels speak of trolls and mobs, of identity and authenticity, in the same breath with which they whisper about the overproduction of personal “data,” “the information of existence” (Lin), or how corporations command “the thrill of the new” to create demand for their products (Tillman).

The lasting achievement of these strange, excellent novels is to represent not only the relentlessness with which the internet intrudes on our perceptions, our consciousness, but also the larger and more distant forces that allow it to do so. “I Hate the Internet” falls into the latter category, as do Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts” (2004), Tao Lin’s “ Taipei” (2013) and Lynne Tillman’s “ Men and Apparitions” (2018). Jarett Kobek wrote these self-ironizing words in his 2016 novel “ I Hate the Internet” now they could serve as a rubric for critics asked to review novels about the internet and to determine whether these novels are solemnly, unrepentantly bad or good in spite of themselves.

No one is talking about this patricia lockwood