No One Is TalkingAbout This A Book Review

Sam Ferguson

Like most men and women of my age and general nerdiness, I am drawn towards online comment sections, those cesspools of opinion in which the learned and the ignorant alike are free to spew, in unsolicited gusts, their most pressing and revealing thoughts and feelings. It was in just such a comment section, in a recent New York Times piece on the closure of some lit mag, that I read the following comment, made by one “ed strong”:

The [novel] form should have been laid to rest around the time of Finnegans Wake. Unfortunately it’s continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for close to a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but most of these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of refusing to lie down and abandon the art form.

Mr. strong no doubt resides in the encampment of the learned, but there is something so ignorant, so offensive, so wrongly conceived in his gloating little missive that I had to pen a comment of my own: “You’re kidding, right? I like FinnegansWake as much as the next pretentious show-off, but it’s an aberration of the novel form, not that form’s apotheosis. Aberrations cannot kill or prevent further use of the forms from which they wander!” (My rejoinder then concluded with a just, but unprintable insult, which likely explains why the Gray Lady’s mods, gentle drudges that they are, decided not to publish it).

But why did I feel I had to answer in the first place? And what compelled me to insult this learned stranger? Defensiveness, of course. The sense that I, a youngish writer, had been denied my invitation to a long-disbanded party, like some Cinderella trapped—not by cruel relations, but by Time (that crueler step-mom)— within the scullery of a future without novels, without literature.

The problem, of course, is that “ed strong” is right, at least in part. The literary culture in this country is dispiriting. The tried-but-true cliché is that we have too many writers, nowhere near enough readers. There are as many MFA programs as stars within the firmament, as many unread books as grains of sand in the Sahara. Gone is the humanist questing of the canon, replaced by the airing of grievances and smartphones.

All of which raises that original cliché, the bugbear of the writing class, the nightmare of the scribblers: Is the novel truly dead, as Mr. strong claims? Or is it, like the Thesean ship, different in its planks yet still itself?

I’m inclined, for all my doubts, toward the latter.

Novels are a form of entertainment, simply put. In the bawdy eighteenth century, the patriarchs of Europe feared their daughters read too much. They were wary both of laziness and overheated passions—the indulgence of the mind, the careless stirrings of the heart. Today, of course, this attitude seems quaint, even evil. It is one of the great paradoxes of literary history that we have, in three brief centuries, come to see all reading as a pure and total good: instructive, mindexpanding, intellectually worthwhile, a trick that boosts our empathy and test scores all at once.

The only problem with this shift from panic to approval (explained, in part, by the birth of the English department) is that it leads us to elide the pleasure principle. We read, first and foremost, for delight. Literature, in other words, is neither a series of bland, instructive tomes nor a survey of huge and inscrutable monuments—a tour of the ruins that starts with TheOdyssey, ends with a whimper at FinnegansWake. It is, instead, a means of communicating pleasure: the pleasures of language, of character, of style. But in a time of Peak Content, of relentless screen seductions and the pressure to “connect,” can such delicate pleasures survive? And why should they?

The novelist and poet Patricia Lockwood has an answer. The response is implicit (as all artistic answers must be), and it comes in the form of No One Is TalkingAboutThis, a novel-in-fragments that seeks to distill, then transcend, the strange collective solitude that haunts our screen-stuck age. I write about it now (two years having passed since its first publication) because it mounts a great defense of the so-called zombie form, using the dazzling faults of the internet—meme culture, loudness, metastasizing irony—to Trojan-horse the virtues of the novel, those pleasures unique to the old written word.

The novel’s unnamed protagonist is a woman in her thirties who’s achieved some small celebrity by posting on “the portal” (our heroine’s term for the internet, a word that goes unused throughout the book). Lockwood herself is a semi-famous Tweeter, and her novel teems with insights on the-way-we-doomscroll-now. Her protagonist exists within a solipsistic paradox, familiar, by now, to all real users of the internet: she is resoundingly alone and yet immersed in others’ thoughts, others’ foibles, others’ jokes. Never before has the hive-mind alienation of Twitter, for example, been so perfectly expressed: It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in the place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooked with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had the one Tupperware stained completely orange. You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon. This passage contains, in stirring microcosm, the whole of Lockwood’s style: the mounting climax of anaphora, the subtle musicality, the vertiginous containment of the huge within the small. Each element combines into the richness of a voice, at once pathetic and dispassionate, quotidian and epic. It is the presence of this voice, this style, that elevates this novel from the object of its satire, the allures of which seem paltry in comparison.

The book is structured in such passages, each about this length, set off from each other by three dots. These fragments, shored against the protagonist’s ruins, impersonate the brevity of social-media content while concealing a deeper, more nourishing wholeness. In this way, Lockwood places her work within the wider formal tradition—largely female, decidedly brainy, accessibly avant-garde—of the novel-in-fragments, a tradition begun with Renata Adler’s Speedboat and continued, in the new millennium, by the works of Jenny Offill. The form is classically postmodern, a response to the splinter and sprawl of all narrative. In these fragmented novels, a heroine (usually lashed with ennui) tells of herself in revealing little snippets, seeking desperately for meaning in the chaos of her life. In the process, she inevitably tells on herself, disclosing some infirmity, some failure of the spine or mind or heart.

In the case of Lockwood’s protagonist, the infirmity is irony. She has earned her dubious portal-fame because she once posted, presumably on Twitter, the nonsensical query, “Can a dog be twins?” The post has gone viral, and she spends her days scrolling and posting, scrolling and posting, struggling to recreate that first rush of virality. She is inundated, drowning, in the pointlessly ironic, a problem she’s aware of but is powerless to change. She is powerless, in fact, to change almost anything around her, not least the political nightmares of her day, which are our political nightmares, and which are rarely made less frightening by our jokes or by our earnestness. But irony, our heroine feels, is much more fun than earnestness, and so she cleaves to it in hopeless shame, like a drowning woman clinging to a punctured life preserver. A typical admission, told in close third person, reads as follows:

One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow. Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole. There was no way out of it. “Dr. Butthole,” she called at night, almost in despair, until he trotted to the door with the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips and disappeared in his alternating stripes over the threshold. There are those of us who find this stuff hilarious. But a life of such jokes will be empty and parched, and the second half of Lockwood’s book is aimed at the dismantling of pointlessness and irony, the embracing of a new and true sincerity.

In accordance with this turn, the book contains two sections, the first of which concerns the protagonist’s malaise. The second, much more powerful, observes her niece’s infancy. This niece is stricken with an illness (terminal, unnamed) which renders her disfigured and yet strangely beatific—an angel cast down into a broken, blameless body. The Dadaist fart jokes of the novel’s early chapters thus give way to lyric yearning as our heroine connects with something bigger than the internet: the miracle of human touch, the problems of mortality, the boundaries which separate and bind us. It is here that the novel’s considerable pleasures—the warm, prosodic prose; the surreal use of metaphor; the fluency with culture from its zenith to its depths—are replaced by pleasures greater and more difficult to name. As I read the novel’s second half, I was reminded of Nabokov’s famous comments praising Dickens: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. The little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud… for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.”

The chief effect of NoOneIsTalkingAboutThis, beyond its inducements to laughter (and, on occasion, to the shame-faced recognition of the self), is this tingle of the spine, the stoking of that flame with which we’re tipped. To quote from this section is to risk mere diminishment, to separate a fragment from its whole and thus expose it, undefended, to the leer of the ironic—though of course it must be done, if only to prove Lockwood’s brilliance. In the novel’s final chapter, to offer one example, the protagonist’s niece is deteriorating rapidly, all while she experiences, like any healthy baby, new sensations. Lockwood captures this impossible situation—the passage toward death at the start of a life—with an earnestness that burns away all readerly defenses:

The Enlightenment went on, pouring itself perpetually into the cup of coffee she drank as she watched the baby in those boiled-clear mornings. One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage—that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.

The novel is filled with such devastating moments, and though they call us toward empathy, toward connection and sincerity, their primary effect is that of pleasure, a higher-order pleasure at once human and divine.

All of which returns me to “ed strong,” and his clichéd remarks on the death of the novel. If Mr. strong has a point, it’s in his concession that “many fine novels have been written” since the Wake. He regards such books as exceptions, rare living works among a horde of dreadful “zombie” novels.

I am willing, in the end, to concede to his concession. Lockwood’s novel is exceptional. It is unusually pleasurable, unusually rich in intellectual, aesthetic, and even (dare I say it?) moral power. Lockwood herself is a rare and gifted novelist—a survivor in the gaudy, glowing wreckage of our culture. She deserves our attention, and we, for our part, deserve the great pleasure of reading her.