Born with Proteus syndrome, the baby is not expected to live long, and to live fully in her flesh for as long as she is around. The idea of any split between mind and body collapses utterly in the face of the protagonist’s infant niece. “Every time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new potatoes,” Lockwood writes, “she thought to herself, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.” If an octopus’s body is a mind, then the internet’s mind must be, surely, a body. Her protagonist flinches squeamishly from the idea of eating octopus after reading an article online about octopus intelligence, in part because she starts to think of the octopus’s body as its mind. She imagines the internet as its own mind, so that to enter the portal is to be swept up in the collective thoughts of everyone else there.īut she is also interested in the idea of a mind as something tactile and fleshy, of thought being something that is enacted by the body. Part of the physicality of Lockwood’s portal comes from her attention to the idea of both the internet as a mind and the mind as a physical object. “She laid her hand against the white wall,” Lockwood writes, “and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. Scrolling through her phone, the unnamed protagonist finds that the tip of her finger has gone numb: “This in the way that your ear used to get soft, pink, and pliant, and the swirls of hair around it like damp designs, from talking on the telephone.” Early on, the protagonist dismisses the portal as “this place where we are on the verge of losing our bodies.” But when a tragedy in offline life pushes the protagonist out of the portal, she looks back at the portal as though it were its own body. It’s hot inside, and blaring white, and everything in the world is there. The internet here is a portal: a place that promises to take you from one location to another, but fails entirely to do so, leaving you stuck only within its own cramped quarters. “Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.” “She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway,” No One Is Talking About This begins.
But rendered in Lockwood’s perverse, funny poet’s prose, this internet is embodied, is warm, is heaving with breath. Most internet novels treat the internet as a place of abstractions, somewhere disembodied and fleshless. One of the most striking things about the internet in No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel and the Vox Book Club’s pick for January, is how physical it feels. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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