No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (208 pages, Riverhead)
Two-thirds through her first novel, Patricia Lockwood slyly skewers the Granite State, saying that the author of a certain book “made New Hampshire sound like a place you wanted to go.”
Worse, the book in question was a sex diary.
Don’t hold it against her. Lockwood skewers everybody and everything in No One Is Talking About This, which is a scathing indictment of online life — or as she calls it, life in “the portal” — combined with a tender story of love and loss.
Lockwood has published two books of poetry as well as a widely acclaimed memoir, 2017’s Priestdaddy. She has a poet’s voice and a hawk’s eye, able to pinpoint contemporary absurdities from fish pedicures to paleo diets, from fatbergs to men who expose themselves online to (yes, this is a thing) snail face cream.
“Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be,” Lockwood writes of her protagonist, a social-media star who inexplicably vaulted to stardom by posting a random question, “Can a dog be twins?”
“This,” Lockwood writes, “had raised her to a certain airy prominence.” Like so many vapid celebrities, the woman becomes famous for being famous and is invited to speak at events with people known more by their user names than their actual names, people whose lives revolve around interacting with strangers and commenting on everything that happens in the world. (Because then they have some say in what happens. “She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT? Even if it was only HEY!”)
Written in a third-person stream of consciousness, with characters who are not identified by name, the style is a bit jarring at first but grows on you, and is fitting for the attention-challenged citizens of the portal, which would be us. While there are traditional chapter breaks, many of the paragraphs act as chapters, as Lockwood blazes from one topic to another: baby Hitlers on the internet, gods of foreigners, jetlag, a dictator who might as well have been identified as Donald Trump.
Her commentary is rich in politics, as when Lockwood writes, “White people, who had the political education of potatoes — lumpy, unseasoned and biased toward the Irish — were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again.”
Even if the reader would normally be inclined to rage at whatever opinion Lockwood expresses, her shocking arrangements of words knocks all the fight out of you. The New York Times has called her a “word witch” with good reason.
I would have been happy to read 300 pages of Lockwood’s poke-the-world zingers, but she inserts a baby into the story, the protagonist’s niece, diagnosed in utero with a terrible disease. The woman leaves her life in the portal to be with family, becoming the sort of person that she had previously avoided on the internet, “the ones in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.”
Ultimately, some of the questions the protagonist screams are the existential problems of life, the same ones that would have been posed by Plato and Aquinas, had they had computers.
“What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politician promised us? The Realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we … could we post about it?”
For all its quirkiness, No One Is Talking About This is a deeply moving novel, one that seems to accomplish something the protagonist says isn’t being done: writing about what’s happening out there, what’s happening in there, what’s happening to us. We gather the things in the portal, Lockwood writes, “as God’s own flowers,” not questioning whether they are poisonous.
Not that real life isn’t enough to slay us. But novels like this alleviate the sting, make dull the poison. A — Jennifer Graham
BOOK NOTES
This may be inspiring or soul-slaying for aspiring writers, but Steven Pressfield wrote for 17 years before he got paid for his craft.
His first hit, however, was out of the park.
It was a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance (Avon, 272 pages), which eventually became a movie. Since then, Pressfield has worked steadily as an author and screenwriter, along the way becoming a respected coach for other artists in his inspirational books The War of Art (Black Irish Entertainment, 190 pages) and Do the Work (Black Irish Entertainment, 112 pages), among others.
Though not as well-known as these titles, other Pressfield books explore the ancient world, usually its military. Gates of Fire (Bantam, 400 pages), for example, is about Spartan soldiers and the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, and it’s required reading for all officers in the U.S. Marine Corps, Pressfield says.
His new novel is A Man at Arms (W.W. Norton, 336 pages), and it’s set in the Roman Empire in the aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus. The protagonist is a character from previous books, Telamon of Arcadia, who has been hired by the Romans to apprehend a courier delivering a letter to insurrectionists in Corinth. It is, according to the publisher, “a gripping saga of conquest and rebellion, bloodshed and faith.” It also sounds like it might be good reading around Easter.
There is, of course, plenty to choose from when it comes to historical novels about the Roman Empire. It’s a subgenre in itself, fueled by readers that Reddit has dubbed “Legionerds.” (A legion was the largest unit in the Roman army.) My favorite of the genre is, appropriately enough, called Legion, by William Altimari (Imperium, 296 pages).
For a deeper dive, check out the three-part series by British author Robert Harris, who specializes in historical fiction. Harris’s most recent book, V2 (Knopf, 320 pages), is set in World War II, but his three-part series on Cicero and Rome was well-regarded. They are Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator, and while published separately in hardcover, they are available in a paperback set from Arrow.
Or, you can skip the fiction and go straight to the history in Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before The Storm, The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (PublicAffairs, 352 pages). — Jennifer Graham
Books
Author events
AMY MACDONALD Monadnock Writers’ Group welcomes children’s book author. Virtual, via Zoom. Sat., March 20, 9:45 a.m. Email [email protected].
• PAULA MUNIER Author presents The Hiding Place. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., March 30, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.
• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).
• MICHAEL TOUGIAS Author of The Waters Between Us presents. Virtual, via Zoom. Part of Concord’s Walker Lecture Series. Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Free. Call 333-0035 or visit walkerlecture.org.
Book Clubs
• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.
• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.
• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.
• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com
• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611 or visit nashualibrary.org.
Poetry
• TEEN POETS LAUREATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE READING Teen Poets Laureate will be reading, screen sharing and discussing their work. An open mic will be open to any teens who are interested in applying for next year’s Teen Poet Laureate New Hampshire program. Part of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s Reading Series. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., March 30, 7 p.m. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.
Featured photo: No One Is Talking About This,
