A Dyke A Broad #53
A review of "No One Is Talking About This", by millennial star and Twitter phenom Patricia Lockwood.
Hello from A Broad!
I’m still largely offline. Not that it felt like it while reading Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, which is supposed to be a novel, but is really a slightly fictionalized memoir that fizzes like a Twitterfeed, broken up into chatty little chunks that showcase her talent, her facility with language, the slightly skewed humorous image, the frequent dips into the Weird. The ear for rhythm and the bon mot. The eye for the sharp observation which she turns on herself as well.
The narrator, of course, is a stand-in for Lockwood, who got so famous for her tweets she became a millennial Fran Lebowitz, winning speaking gigs on the strength of it. And the first half of her book details her life lived entirely online with “The Portal” both an obsession and a career.
I snacked on it like handfuls of jellybeans until it made me faintly ill and I put it down for a while. There were perceptive observations about social media—the brief life cycles of people and ideas there, which written out as flatly as that aren’t as compelling or fresh as you’d think. Plenty of images were a delight. But a novel, even a memoir, is not an essay or a tweet, and after a while I yearned for the writer channeling all those ideas and all those words to quit skimming the surface like a water bug, go deeper, shift.
When she finally did halfway through—the narrator’s pregnant sister discovering there was something the matter with the baby inside her which means the narrator’s real life starts happening offline and in the flesh—I felt… ugh. How convenient. I mean, I’m sure it happened to the author in real real life. And what a heaven-sent contrast with life online, but still…
Lockwood shouldn’t have given in to temptation. Grappling with what the internet is, and is doing to her, she should have found some other crisis, fought her way to some other narrative hinge. Because she got there easily, artificially, even while she was finding ingenious images to convey what she felt and thought—accompanying her sister to the GYN, sitting at the hospital, or at the infant’s bedside, holding the child’s fragile body—each detailed little segment still felt engineered for an audience with ADD.
It was still fizzed and popped. Only now, those same overblown, slightly surreal images, and the quirky, self-conscious, ironic observations that were amusing or poignant as tweets came across as kind of… thin. Even false at times. All playing to the crowd. As if Twitter’s writing conventions would not let her break free with any kind of genuine feeling, genuine thought. So that every time Lockwood’s narrator would proclaim her pain or her grief, as an almost automatic reflex Lockwood the writer would cut away from the scene too soon, indulge in another rococo metaphor or simile. So that no emotion her narrator expressed ever felt quite true.
Even Lockwood seems to be uneasy about her project.
In the first section she tosses off,
“Why were we all writing like this now?” the narrator wonders. “Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”
She doesn’t really follow up the idea, though. It just hangs there. A lot of her thoughts do. Like she can’t quite commit to them, just churns them out and sees what gets her the most likes. Most shares, retweets.
Which is too bad because I think that’s the heart of everything now. Is what obsesses me. How hard it is to step back from the machine of social media, which shapes both progressive and regressive politics, essentially thinking your thoughts for you. And makes it almost impossible to ask yourself—as you find yourself liking and sharing, even find yourself parroting the latest position on gender on race on policing— if you really think that, too.
I wondered what would happen if this extremely self-conscious author—all too aware of her audience which may award a post likes and eternal life one moment, or damnation the next if she dare offend in a way that is not ironically titillating—one day abandoned the fireworks of natural musicality and craft, tried to strip away the mask of style. The pose. Maybe even blow things up now and then, or burn them down. Find some way to let the air in. Ask herself, when she writes some particularly clever line, not does it sound good, or does it feel right, but do I really believe this? Is it true?
Or maybe those are thoughts only an auld person would have. Coming from Generation X whose pose was the anti-pose authenticity of garage bands. Dunno.
A look at Lockwood from another old, Mary Gordon, Beatifying Patricia Lockwood: “I Worry That She Hasn’t Had Enough Fun.”
Millennial writer Helen Lewis offers links and thoughts about Sally Rooney, another millennial writer but a significant 10 years younger than Lockwood. Yes, age matters.
Rooney is the first writer I’ve seen who understands the language of being Extremely Online well enough to use it without self-reflexiveness. (This is what I mean by the difference from Oyler and Lockwood, whose tone is more: jeez, look how the internet has made us insane.) It’s always an important moment in the culture when something moves from spectacle to background hum—like when we could stop writing “the microblogging platform Twitter” in articles and just write “Twitter”.
…
To do this requires more than talent, of course. You have to be born at the right time. Douglas Adams once captured how we respond to technology:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
In Will BlackLivesMatter Fall Into the Elephant's Graveyard of Social Movements?, Freddie deBoer raises questions about the tension in activism between disorder and paralyzing money-grubbing professionalization.
A Little Violent Irony
Worth mentioning that the philosopher Kathleen Stock who makes them feel unsafe is actually getting so many threats for daring to assert that biological sex is real, that police are worried about her being attacked or killed. So she doesn’t just feel unsafe, she is unsafe. Which it seems like, should be considered worse. Unless there’s confusion about what the words is and feel actually imply.
Women and the pay gap this week in the Invisible Women newsletter
…after years of thinking it was men’s fault for systematically kicking us out of professions when they became more prestigious, or society’s fault for undervaluing caring roles, it turns out that all along it was our fault!
So anyway, this is me sliding back into thinking about gender and how generation maybe makes a difference in how we view it. Or view anything, for that matter.
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours,
Smelly Bogswell