No One Is Talking About This By Patricia Lockwood

This is one of the strangest novels I’ve read for a long time and found it quite difficult to know how to take it, which perhaps is the point of the book. The story trots along in small segments of a few paragraphs, sometimes just a line, sometimes just an exclamation, as if to mirror the attention span of the protagonist. For more of than half of the narrative the subject matters flicks from one thing to another like scrolling randomly through the internet and jumping from from one thing to another from the sublime to the ridiculous in an instant. Then within this context her sister suffers a personal tragedy and the story seems to wrestle with how the sister-narrator can accomodate this from within a mind filled with the junk of the internet. It works well as a black comedy and also an insight into the minds of those who live most of their lives online which when you see a carriage load of commuters hooked to their phones is more of us than you might suppose.

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