Book Review: "No One is Talking About This" by Patricia Lockwood

I had been waiting to read this book for ages because I needed it to come down in price. I wasn't about to pay full price for a book so short and so, I waited and waited and it's been almost a year. The book has finally shot down in price. No One is Talking About This is a book by the poet and 'modernist' writer Patricia Lockwood - littered with viral references that you will only understand if you spend every waking moment on the internet or watching streaming service television - I initially read this because I heard it was supposed to evoke Joan Didion. Instead, it fell completely flat and I don't think I have rolled my eyes quite as much at a book in a very long time. It really isn't like Joan Didion at all. Instead, it is just some middle class woman complaining about middle class problem - the main one being sitting on social media for a long time. So this is where I give a bad review of a book made for the TikTok generation: no depth, no meaning, simply nothing but references and jumps between topics. This might be the only book that is doomed to make you stupider and stupider as you read it.

Patricia Lockwood's attempts to be 'funny' and 'quirky' and often times 'deep' are clouded with meaningless references to social media - with the 'quirkiness' coming off as just rather silly and cliché. I don't think that this writer understands that the reason for 'scrolling' and 'posting' goes far deeper than wanting to be a 'viral star'. But the main character, also the narrator, proves to be an unlikeable, unrelatable woman who basically has everything to be grateful for and yet still has to complain by preaching to the choir. I think the fact that she still had grounds to complain about her life whilst she was basically just living on social media was vapid and made the character come off as boring and one-dimensional.

As the book jumps from one subject to the other, I was not too impressed by the lack of depth given to each individual topic. Every now and again, Lockwood tries to produce depth by giving us these extended metaphors about why we are on the internet at all. But again, it comes too little too late, the book has already made up its mind and these strange existential insertions come across as self-absorbed and out of character for the narrator. This is because the reader already knows the narrator lacks basic intelligence and self-awareness.

I wouldn't call the book as being written in a 'modernist' style or a 'stream of consciousness'. Instead, it reads like it was written in an hour and then never really revised. The book could do with some serious editing and maybe a glossary for those of us who don't spend every waking moment on social media keeping up with the latest vapid 'trends'. The book lacks emotional strength and thus, becomes even more unrelatable to most readers. You would have to be really empty and without much of a personality in real life to be connected to this book and so, there is not much going for it at all.

In conclusion, most of the book was an absolute bore: a narrator who lacks emotional intelligence and self-awareness, a writer who lacks basic writing skills, themes which aren't explored, random moment of existentialism that come off as ungrateful and self-absorbed and an almost underlying narcissism that thrives on telling people 'this is how you should be communicating...' I think that it is obvious to a lot of people why this book didn't win any awards.

From 2022 so far, this is the worst book I have read all year.