No One Is Talking About This

This one was weird. At times interesting, funny, emotional, and poignant — but very weird. The back cover calls it “genre-defying,” which feels right. I'd say this sits somewhere between poetry, satire, and internet speak. It's a novel made up of nearly schizophrenic, barely linear fragments of internet culture: a little bit of everything all of the time. But then towards the middle it starts dovetailing into a family drama, which feels like a departure from the earlier part of the book. Some really quotable lines throughout.

Jeg er virkelig usikker. Dette har vært en unormalt krevende konsentrasjonsøvelsue på tross av korte avsnitt og ganske så enkelt, lyrisk og elokvent språk. Jeg vet at det handler om livet i en portal, og om hvordan det er å leve i nærheten av noen som har barn med proteus-syndrom, et syndrom jeg aldri har betegnelsen på før, men som jeg har sett i den strålende filmen “Elefantmannen” med Anthony Hopkins. Det litterære dilemmaet skal være gåten skjerm/virkelig liv og jeg forstår det gjennom konsentrasjon. Samtidig blir det springende, språklige hopp og sprett som jeg ofte liker hos andre forfattere, men som i denne innpakningen gjør at jeg mister nerven, det som skaper det dype engasjementet for hovedpersonene - helt til del to, hvor småbarnet med proteussyndromet tar over plassen som hovedperson - og da forstår jeg hvorfor andre liker dette så godt. For min egen del ble det nok litt for spesielt, og flinkheten i den kreative utfoldelsen blir nettopp det: For flinkt.

In the first part of this book there's an obvious comparison to be made to Jenny Offill's writing with its short, interlinked paragraphs, but the motives feel different. This is more like a printout of a Twitter feed than a considered collection of vignettes. The second part is a grief memoir and it took me by surprise because the shift in tone was so dramatic, but it becomes something quite beautiful once you've settled into it. As a whole, this is a story about how the internet has taken over our lives and the few brief intervals of respite we get from it when ‘real life' intervenes. It's painfully of the moment, and prompts us to consider what's more important in life - actual human contact, or the bizarre and fleeting internet notoriety that so many people seem to crave these days.

People throw around the term "digital native" as if it's the province of particular generations (another fake idea), but Lockwood's character here is the ur-digital native, a person whose whole existence is mediated by the Portal's idiom.

As a person who considered herself terminally online for a period of time, and made her living from the vicissitudes of "content creation" before it was tagged with that name, there was a lot to identify with here. The push and pull between the Portal and the Real in the latter half of the book seems to come as a surprise to the protagonist but the rest of us saw it coming and, in my case, were filled with dread.