{"id":4118,"date":"2021-08-11T21:59:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T09:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=4118"},"modified":"2021-10-04T22:17:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T09:17:32","slug":"no-one-is-talking-about-this-patricia-lockwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2021\/08\/11\/no-one-is-talking-about-this-patricia-lockwood\/","title":{"rendered":"No One Is Talking About This — Patricia Lockwood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"No<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The first half of the book is dizzying — stupid — hilarious — it\u2019s a series of seemingly random impressions, vignettes, observations and ideas of a narrator who is an Internet celebrity and is steeped in Internet culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAhahaha!\u201d she yelled, the new and funnier way to laugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Jane Austen\u2019s style: What someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Our narrator does have a social conscience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDon\u2019t normalize it!!!!!\u201d we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize<\/em>, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Even a spate of sternly worded articles called \u201cGuess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem\u201d was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that <\/em>wasn\u2019t doing it, what would??<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I have really enjoyed the other pieces<\/a> I have read by Patricia Lockwood, so I was looking forward to this novel. I was not disappointed. There\u2019s a lot of ingeniously banal silliness, the kind I could read all day. It\u2019s like the Best of Twitter or something. Having said that, she is skeptical of social media. And who isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So all that amusing nonsense sets the scene. Then the narrator\u2019s (real) life suddenly gets complicated as her family falls into a\u2026 not a tragedy, but a very wrenching and difficult ongoing situation. The story changes as emotion and pathos mix in with the archness and irony. The narrator reveals great depths of feeling and tenderness and it is all quite moving. The book is very different at the end from how I thought it would be at the beginning.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first half of the book is dizzying — stupid — hilarious — it\u2019s a series of seemingly random impressions, vignettes, observations and ideas of a narrator who is an Internet celebrity and is steeped in Internet culture. \u201cAhahaha!\u201d she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,63,204],"class_list":["post-4118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-books","tag-novels","tag-patricia-lockwood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4118"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4118\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}