No One Is Talking About This
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| Author | Patricia Lockwood |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Internet, grief |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Riverhead Books |
Publication date | February 16, 2021 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 978-0-59318-958-0 (Hardcover) |
| Website | No One Is Talking About This at Penguin Random House |
No One Is Talking About This is the debut novel by American poet Patricia Lockwood.
Development and publication history
Riverhead Books published No One Is Talking About This in February 2021. It was simultaneously released by Bloomsbury in the UK, where it was the subject of a 10-way auction, and was commissioned for translation in German, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Czech, and other languages.[1] Excerpts of the novel appeared as stories in The New Yorker and The London Review of Books.[2]
Content
The book, broken into two parts, follows an unnamed female protagonist's interactions with a virtual platform called "the portal" and utilizes stream of consciousness and other modernist, poetic, and experimental approaches. The novel's first half largely operates without a traditional plot. “I was trying to write an atmosphere,” Lockwood told the New York Times. “I was trying to write something that is on the inside of your head that is almost before language."[3] The second half of the book, which Lockwood has stated is autofictional, presents a family tragedy and explores concepts of grief, perception, consciousness, and permanence.
Reception
Writing for The New York Review of Books, Clair Wills praised the novel as "an arch descendant of Austen’s socio-literary style -- a novel of observation, crossed with a memoir of a family crisis, and written as a prose poem, steeped in metaphor."[4] The Seattle Times' Emma Levy compared its structure and narrative style to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, while Molly Young of New York magazine drew parallels to Vladimir Nabokov, "less in style than in attitude, one of extraordinary receptivity to the gifts, sorrows, and bloopers of existence."[5] In The Wall Street Journal, Emily Bobrow called the novel "artful" and "an intimate and moving portrait of love and grief."[6] The Guardian and the Telegraph both heralded the book as "a masterpiece."[7]
In a mixed review for the Los Angeles Times, critic Hillary Kelly wrote that No One Is Talking About This is "either a work of genius or an exasperating endurance trial," comparing it to the novels of Virginia Woolf: "The Waves is masterful, but there's a reason we read Mrs. Dalloway far more." Lockwood’s book itself makes direct reference to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with which it shares a number of aesthetic and ontological concerns.[8]
References
- ^ "Bloomsbury Wins Auction for Lockwood's "Miraculous" Debut Novel". The Bookseller. Retrieved 2020-09-16.
- ^ Lockwood, Patricia. "The Winged Thing". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-11-23.
- ^ Khatib, Joumana. "She's Ready to Discuss Just About Anything". The New York Times. Retrieved 2021-02-10.
- ^ Wills, Clair. "Bildungsonline". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ Levy, Emma. "Patricia Lockwood brings the chaos and comedy of social media to print". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 2021-02-09.
- ^ Bobrow, Emily. "Life in the Slipstream". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ Cosslett, Rhiannon Lucy. "What can the modern novel tell us about life in the age of the internet?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ Kelly, Hillary. "Can a novel wrestle Twitter and win?". The LA Times. Retrieved 2021-02-09.