No One Is Talking About This

Starred review from November 9, 2020
Lockwood’s debut novel comes packed with the humor, bawdiness, and lyrical insight that buoyed her memoir Priestdaddy. The unnamed narrator—made famous by a viral post that read, “Can a dog be twins”—travels the world to speak on panels, where she explains such things as why it’s better to use the spelling “sneazing” (it’s “objectively funnier”). While in Vienna for a conference, her mother urges her to come home to Ohio, where the narrator’s younger sister is having complications with her pregnancy and may need a late-term abortion. There, in the book’s shimmering second half, the internet jokes continue between the sisters as a means of coping with uncertainty, and resonate with the theme of life’s ephemerality vs. the internet’s infinitude. Throughout, a fragmented style captures and sometimes elevates a series of text messages and memes amid the meditations on family (“I’m convinced the world is getting too full lol, her brother texted her, the one who obliterated himself at the end of every day with a personal comet called Fireball”). This mighty novel screams with laughter just as it wallops with grief. Agent: Mollie Glick, Creative Arts Agency.

December 15, 2020
Debut novel from the internet-famous poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy (2017). Lockwood first made a name for herself on Twitter: "@parisreview So is Paris any good or not." Such was the acclaim of this 2013 tweet that the Paris Review felt compelled to respond to it--a year after it was first posted--with a review of Paris. In 2013, Lockwood achieved a new level of web-based fame when "Rape Joke" went viral. This poem seems, in retrospect, to have been perfectly calibrated for a moment when people--mostly young or youngish, largely online--were asking themselves who gets to talk about what and how. But it also succeeds--and continues to succeed--as a work of literature. All of this is to say that Lockwood is very much of the internet but also, perhaps, our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art. Her debut novel is divided into two parts. The first introduces us to a nameless protagonist who makes up famous tweets and composes blog posts and turns this into a career traveling the world talking about tweets and blog posts. In the second part, this character goes back to her family home when she learns that the baby her sister is carrying has a profound congenital disorder. The first part is written in short little bursts that feel like Instagram captions or texts--but if Lydia Davis was writing Instagram captions and texts. The second part is written in short little bursts that feel like they're being written in spare moments snatched while caring for an infant. (Again, Lydia Davis comes to mind.) This bifurcation mirrors the protagonist's own meditations on the difference between the life that she chooses online and the life that comes crashing in on her, but it's a mistake to imagine that this novel is simply an indictment of the former and a celebration of the latter. The woman at the center of this novel doesn't trade ironic laughter for soul-shattering awe so much as she reveals that both can coexist in the same life and that, sometimes, they may be indistinguishable. An insightful--frequently funny, often devastating--meditation on human existence online and off.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2021
In this first novel from poet and memoirist Lockwood (Priestdaddy, 2017), an unnamed woman practically lives in ""the portal,"" which is something like the internet. A viral post--""Can a dog be twins?""--lent her ""a certain airy prominence,"" and now she speaks about the portal on panels all over the world. On the top of a Ferris wheel in Vienna, she receives a text that sends her back home to Ohio: concerning information has appeared late in her younger sister's pregnancy. So begins the book's part two, and the first stirrings of a conventional plot. Lockwood's narration of the woman's thoughts propels this provocative, addictive, and unusual novel. The book's first half is filled with her darkly irreverent, mordant musings on the portal and how it got to this, a screen-addled situation that sounds much like our own. After the revelation, though, the scroll of posts and memes is replaced by another unfathomable yet recognizable place, one of sickness, doctors' best guesses, and a crystalline hope for survival; it's like a stream rushing to an ocean. With unfettered, imagistic language, Lockwood conjures both a digital life that's easily fallen into, and the sorts of love and grief that can make it all fall away.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.