No One Is Talking About This

"Shortlist"

"First of all, Lockwood is a poet, as well as a novelist. This really shows in the care at the sentence level of this book. There’s a kind of crystalline brilliance in the writing of the sentences that makes it quite remarkable. The book is full of these very short little snippets, these little vignettes. You can see where ‘Poet Laureate of Twitter’ comes from. I think that she’s able to pull that off because she is so in command of her sentences. That’s certainly one of the things that I responded to very strongly. Then it’s a book that manages to be formally inventive without flaunting it, in a way that really makes sense for the story it’s trying to tell. She has, I think, created a method of storytelling that mirrors the experience of being extremely online. The final thing I would say about it is that if you look at the plot, it really hinges on this question of how a certain kind of language, how a certain mode of experiencing the outer world can contain or respond to experiences that fall so wildly beyond it. And that’s what happens at the second half of the book when it takes a very marked turn into family drama and, ultimately, tragedy. It’s a book that is genuinely unlike any other book I have read in terms of style and form and the way in which it’s really pressing on the relationship between the methods that we have of speaking and experiencing and communicating today, and the ways we have of being human."