My Cultural Diet

We’re not designed to be online all the time and experience a never-ending stream of news, information, updates, and memes. Patricia Lockwood’s wry and pithy No One Is Talking About This is a deep dive into all the ways being constantly online flattens and trivializes everything, until it’s nigh-impossible to differentiate between the important and the inane. Which is certainly a worthy and relevant topic. However, Lockwood’s stream-of-consciousness style and endless non sequiturs — which are clearly intended to mimic the random, bite-sized nature of social media posts — get her point across pretty quickly and soon start to belabor it. Lockwood’s writing can be funny, affecting, and heartbreaking — I even found it convicting at times — but you have to wade through a lot for those moments, and oftentimes, her novel will just leave you thinking “OK, OK, I get it.” On a side note, after about fifty pages, No One Is Talking About This started to feel really familiar. Sure enough, my library account confirmed that I’d previously checked it out back in June 2021. I’d completely forgotten that and whether or not I’d already read it — and I rarely forget such details. So take that for whatever it’s worth.

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