‘No One Is Talking About This’ by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead Books, 2021)
In an interview the people’s comedian Stewart Lee, esteemed British author Iain Sinclair commented on changes in the cultural knowledge over time noting that “older, deeper, stranger knowledge is disappearing”.
Here and now, in the Google universe, everything is searchable and, on a superficial level at least, knowable. Among the list of ‘100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet’, Pamela Paul lists ‘Being the only one’, ‘Private Observances’ , ‘Blocking Things Out’ and ‘Figuring Out Who That Actor Was’. This makes for a light-hearted topic at a dinner party but in the internet novel ‘No One Is Talking About This’, Patricia Lockwood makes it abundantly clear that the re-wiring of our brains has more serious consequences.
She addresses head-on the growing perception that despite the ultra-connectedness of the 21st Century, we are losing the ability to communicate or to understand reality. Lockwood writes: “The future intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.” Arguing with people you’ve never met and never will meet is no substitute for face to face confrontations or any way to be human.
In an age where everything is shared, it’s becoming harder to feel unique or special. Instead of finding ourselves, our identities are being eroded to the point that we end up sounding more and more like each other.
It is tempting to dismiss such concerns about this apparent collective insanity as a generational issue. Those born before internet was a thing (officially, pre-January 1, 1983) have an entirely different perception of the world. Digital natives are unlikely to lament the absence of something they have never experienced first-hand. But having information literally at our fingertips opens up a potentially dystopian landscape masquerading as a utopian society. Iain Sinclair , born almost four decades pre-internet, can be nostalgic for relative ignorance about what was happening in the world. This may not have been a blissful state it meant that choices seem simpler and more profound knowledge had to be gained.
Patricia Lockwood is just 40 but she can fully empathize with Sinclair’s fears about the way social networks neutralize or ignore life’s challenges and fears. In her novel, she refers to Twitter as ‘the portal’ and as a garden that looks attractive yet turns out to be no bed of roses: “We took the things we found in the portal for granted as if they had grown there”, she writes, but notes how this complacency makes users blind to the poisonous plants cultivated online by malicious plantsmen and women.
An innocent search can easily lure you down a wormhole of half-truths, blatant lies and false equivalences with potentially dire consequences: “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
Lockwood’s not so reassuring conclusion is that “Cavemen knew better who they were than we do.” The overriding topic of her novel is the fragility of a new life and this is the focus of the second half. The question she implicitly raises is : How do you communicate grief and loss in a communal way without trivializing the feelings? The short answer is that you cannot. Emotions exist even when you don’t have language to express them. Personal stories or observations on the social networks are not dominated by dread but by the need to be joyful, provocative and/or entertaining.
Lockwood’s novel exposes the awkward gulf between witty observations about existing in online platforms and the more intense thoughts about dealing with grief and loss in the real world. It leads to the realisation that, since the grimmer aspects of real life cannot be pitched as entertainment they have to be dealt with offline and very often alone.
