Look Inside No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
The first half is the portal. The second half is what it costs.
For you if
you have been extremely online long enough to become fluent in it and have felt, at some point, the gap between that fluency and what you actually need language for
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The first half of this novel is written in the fragmented syntax of social media — memes, viral moments, the specific texture of collective internet consciousness, the jokes that only make sense if you've been extremely online for years — and it is very funny and very accurate and slightly terrifying. Then in the second half something happens in the narrator's family and she has to come back into her body and the portal goes quiet and the language changes entirely. The formal break between the two halves is the argument: the portal makes you fluent in a language that has no words for what actually matters, trains your attention toward the collective and away from the specific, and then when the specific arrives — a sick child, a dying parent, a body in a hospital — the fluency is worse than useless. Lockwood is the poet laureate of extremely online and she takes internet culture completely seriously as a subject, which is why the book lands where it does. The most formally precise literary account of what social media does to attention and presence, delivered in the form of the thing it is describing. Booker Prize shortlist.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
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