patricia lockwood london review of books updike

The New Yorker & Me

Introduction.

What is The New Yorker ? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Kolbert for Mogelson. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, November 9, 2019

• Patricia Lockwood on John Updike

2 comments:

Nice summary. Can only imagine how Lockwood would treat Amis. I'd want to look, but would do so thru my fingers.

I could never read Updike nor Amis, except for his essays. I wouldn't hide behind my fingers. Lockwood is a tefreshing, somtimes shocking addition to the literary scene, definitely a blood transfusion to the brain or a tazer to the senses. She makes me laugh out loud, rare when you are 81.

• 3 for the River (5)
• 3 for the Road (13)
• 3 for the Sea (13)
• 3 More for the Road (13)
• 5 McPhee Canoe Trips (2)
• 5001 Nights at the Movies (8)
• 9/11 Memorial (1)
• A. D. Nuttall (1)
• A. J. Liebling (11)
• A. O. Scott (2)
• A. S. Byatt (1)
• Aaron Diehl (2)
• Abdellatif Kechiche (1)
• Acts of Seeing (14)
• Ad Reinhardt (1)
• Ada Limón (2)
• Adam Begley (3)
• Adam Foulds (1)
• Adam Gopnik (43)
• Adam Iscoe (6)
• Adam Kirsch (6)
• Adam Phillips (1)
• Adam Shatz (2)
• Adam Shoalts (1)
• Adam Zagajewski (3)
• Agnes Martin (1)
• Agnès Varda (2)
• Ahmed Rashid (1)
• AJ Frackattack (1)
• Al Franken (1)
• Al Hirschfeld (1)
• Alan Arkin (1)
• Alan Broadbent (2)
• Albert Camus (1)
• Alden Nowlan (1)
• Alec Soth (1)
• Alec Wilder (2)
• Alec Wilkinson (16)
• Alejandro Chacoff (1)
• Aleksandar Hemon (6)
• Alex Abramovich (2)
• Alex Haley (1)
• Alex Katz (3)
• Alex Ross (29)
• Alexander Nemerov (4)
• Alexander Pope (1)
• Alexandra Jacob (1)
• Alexandra Schwartz (16)
• Alfonso Cuarón (1)
• Alfred Hitchcock (1)
• Alfredo Cáliz (1)
• Alice Driver (1)
• Alice Gregory (1)
• Alice McDermott (1)
• Alice Munro (4)
• Alice Zoo (1)
• Allen Ginsberg (1)
• Amanda Petrusich (1)
• Amedeo Modigliani (1)
• Amelia Lester (15)
• Amia Srinivasan (1)
• Amy Goldwasser (2)
• Amy Lombard (2)
• Amy Sillman (1)
• Ana Juan (1)
• Anagh Banerjee (1)
• André Aciman (1)
• André Carrilho (3)
• Andre D. Wagner (2)
• André Malraux (2)
• Andrea K. Scott (31)
• Andrea Thompson (2)
• Andrea Ventura (7)
• Andrew Dominik (1)
• Andrew Marantz (3)
• Andrew O'Hagan (8)
• Andrew Wyeth (3)
• Andy Friedman (2)
• Andy Warhol (4)
• Ange Mlinko (1)
• Angelica Garnett (2)
• Angie Wang (2)
• Anita Desai (1)
• Anka Muhlstein (1)
• Ann Beattie (1)
• Ann Patchett (4)
• Anna Russell (7)
• Anne Boyer (7)
• Anne Carson (1)
• Anne Golaz (1)
• Annette Marnat (1)
• Annie Proulx (4)
• Anthony Bailey (19)
• Anthony Bourdain (2)
• Anthony Gottlieb (1)
• Anthony Lane (77)
• Anton Chekhov (2)
• Antony Huchette (1)
• Anuj Shrestha (1)
• April Bernard (1)
• April Bloomfield (1)
• Ariel Levy (3)
• Arlene Croce (5)
• Arthur Krystal (2)
• Arthur Lubow (3)
• Arthur Miller (1)
• Arthur Penn (1)
• Artur Domoslawski (1)
• Asif Kapadia (1)
• At the Archive (3)
• Atul Gawande (1)
• Aude Van Ryn (1)
• August Kleinzahler (1)
• August Sander (1)
• B. F. Skinner (1)
• B. J. Leggett (2)
• Bar Tab (1)
• Barack Obama (4)
• Barry Blitt (1)
• Barry Levinson (1)
• Barry Lopez (2)
• Basharat Peer (1)
• Becca Rothfeld (1)
• Becka Viau (1)
• Becky Cooper (14)
• Ben Affleck (1)
• Ben Greenman (1)
• Ben Lerner (5)
• Ben Maddow (2)
• Ben McGrath (20)
• Ben Ratliff (1)
• Ben Taub (10)
• Bendik Kaltenborn (13)
• Benjamin Anastas (1)
• Benjamin Hedin (1)
• Benjamin Labatut (1)
• Benjamin Lowy (6)
• Benjamin Moser (1)
• Benjamin Shapiro (1)
• Benjamin Taylor (1)
• Benoit Pilon (1)
• Berenice Abbott (1)
• Bernard Berenson (1)
• Bernard Madoff (1)
• Bernd and Hilda Becher (1)
• Berton Roueché (3)
• Best of 2010 (1)
• Best of 2011 (1)
• Best of 2012 (1)
• Best of 2013 (1)
• Best of 2014 (1)
• Best of 2020 (1)
• Best of 2021 (8)
• Best of 2022 (9)
• Best of the Decade (14)
• Betsy Morais (1)
• Betty Woodman (1)
• Bettye LaVette (3)
• Bianca Bagnarelli (1)
• Bill Barich (1)
• Bill Bragg (2)
• Bill Brandt (1)
• Bill Buford (9)
• Bill Charlap (5)
• Bill Knott (1)
• Billy Strayhorn (1)
• Bjorn Lie (1)
• Blake Bailey (1)
• Blexbolex (1)
• Bob Dylan (2)
• Bob Staake (1)
• Bonnie and Clyde (3)
• Bonnie Costello (3)
• Bookforum (17)
• Boyhood (1)
• Bożena Shallcross (1)
• Brad Leithauser (1)
• Brad Mehldau (1)
• Brassai (1)
• Brenda Shaughnessy (1)
• Brenda Wineapple (1)
• Brian De Palma (1)
• Brian Dillon (2)
• Brian Emfinger (1)
• Brian Kellow (3)
• Brian Seibert (2)
• Briana Younger (2)
• Brice Marden (1)
• Bruce Diones (3)
• Bruce McCall (1)
• Bruno Bettelheim (1)
• Bruno Martino (1)
• Burkhard Bilger (34)
• Byron Eggenschwiler (1)
• C. D. B. Bryan (1)
• C. K. Williams (1)
• Cait Oppermann (2)
• Calvin Tomkins (11)
• Calvin Trillin (12)
• Camille Pissarro (2)
• Carl Rotella (2)
• Carnovsky (1)
• Carol Sloane (1)
• Caroline Tompkins (2)
• Carolyn Drake (5)
• Carolyn Kormann (7)
• Carter Burwell (1)
• Casey N. Cep (1)
• Caspar David Friedrich (3)
• CBC Radio (1)
• Cecil Beaton (1)
• Cécile McLorin Salvant (4)
• Cecilia Carstedt (1)
• Chandler Burr (1)
• Chang Park (1)
• Chang-Rae Lee (3)
• Charis Wilson (1)
• Charles Finch (2)
• Charles McGrath (6)
• Charles Reich (1)
• Charles Simic (6)
• Charles Wright (2)
• Charlie Engman (1)
• Charlotte Mendelson (4)
• Charlotte Shane (1)
• Chimes at Midnight (1)
• Chinua Achebe (1)
• Chris Gash (2)
• Chris Wiley (6)
• Christa Wolf (1)
• Christaan Felber (4)
• Christian Lorentzen (1)
• Christian Wiman (1)
• Christina Gransow (1)
• Christine Smallwood (3)
• Christoph Mueller (1)
• Christoph Niemann (1)
• Christopher Benfey (2)
• Christopher Carroll (1)
• Christopher Hitchens (1)
• Christopher Payne (1)
• Christopher Ricks (3)
• Claes Oldenburg (1)
• Claudia Roth Pierpont (8)
• Clive James (10)
• Clyfford Still (1)
• Colin Burrow (1)
• Colin Stokes (12)
• Colin Thubron (1)
• Collier Schorr (1)
• Colm Tóibín (5)
• Colson Whitehead (1)
• Connie Walker (1)
• Conor Langton (4)
• Cormac McCarthy (9)
• Cory Arcangel (1)
• Craig Seligman (5)
• Crazy Horse (1)
• Cristiana Couceiro (2)
• Curran Hatleberg (2)
• Curtis Sittenfeld (6)
• Cynthia Ozick (1)
• Cynthia Zarin (2)
• Czeslaw Milosz (2)
• D. H. Lawrence (2)
• D. J. Enright (1)
• D. T. Max (6)
• Dadu Shin (1)
• Dahlia Lithwick (2)
• Dale Carpenter (2)
• Damien Hirst (1)
• Dan Chiasson (58)
• Dan Greene (1)
• Dan Kois (1)
• Dan Piepenbring (2)
• Dan Winters (4)
• Dana Goodyear (32)
• Dana Schutz (1)
• Dana Stevens (2)
• Daniel Berehulak (1)
• Daniel Halpern (1)
• Daniel Krall (2)
• Daniel Mendelsohn (5)
• Daniel Salmieri (1)
• Daniel Shea (2)
• Daniel Soar (1)
• Daniel Soloman (1)
• Danielle Allen (3)
• Daniyal Mueenuddin (1)
• Danyoung Kim (1)
• Darren Coffield (1)
• Darryl Pinckney (2)
• Dave Burrell (1)
• Dave McKenna (1)
• David Benjamin Sherry (1)
• David Black (2)
• David Cole (1)
• David Craig (1)
• David Denby (25)
• David Fincher (2)
• David Foster Wallace (1)
• David Grann (4)
• David Guttenfelder (1)
• David Hansen (1)
• David Huddle (1)
• David Hughes (1)
• David Kortava (8)
• David Levine (7)
• David Long (1)
• David Macfarlane (1)
• David Maraniss (1)
• David Means (1)
• David Orr (1)
• David Owen (14)
• David Park (1)
• David Peters Corbett (2)
• David Remnick (20)
• David Runciman (1)
• David S. Allee (2)
• David Salle (3)
• David Shields (3)
• David St. John (2)
• David Szalay (1)
• David Tarbet (1)
• David Wagoner (2)
• David Williams (2)
• David Wright Faladé (1)
• Davide Luciano (1)
• Davide Monteleone (4)
• Deana Lawson (2)
• Deanna Dikeman (3)
• Deborah Treisman (2)
• Debra Nystrom (1)
• Delphine Lebourgeois (1)
• Demetrios Psillos (1)
• Denis de Rougemont (2)
• Denis Johnson (1)
• Dexter Filkins (12)
• Diana Krall (1)
• Diane Arbus (4)
• Dick Conant (1)
• Dina Litovsky (9)
• Dinaw Mengestu (1)
• Dolly Faibyshev (5)
• Dominic Nahr (1)
• Don Friedman (1)
• Donald Barthelme (1)
• Donald Hall (1)
• Donald Trump (1)
• Dora Zhang (5)
• Doreen St. Félix (5)
• Dorothea Lange (2)
• Douglas Preston (2)
• Draft No. 4 (8)
• Duke Ellington (5)
• Dwight Garner (11)
• Dylan Kerr (2)
• E. B. Sledge (1)
• E. B. White (5)
• E. J. Bellocq (1)
• Eamon Grennan (1)
• Ed Caesar (8)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1)
• Edmund Wilson (1)
• Édouard Manet (2)
• Edward Burtynsky (1)
• Edward Hoagland (23)
• Edward Hopper (10)
• Edward Mendelson (4)
• Edward Sorel (4)
• Edward Weston (3)
• Edwin Fotheringham (1)
• Elaine Blair (1)
• Eleanor Birne (1)
• Eleanor Cook (2)
• Eleanor Davis (2)
• Eli Weinberg (3)
• Elie Nadelman (1)
• Elif Batuman (17)
• Elizabeth Barber (4)
• Elizabeth Bishop (18)
• Elizabeth Hardwick (3)
• Elizabeth Kolbert (25)
• Elizabeth Tallent (1)
• Ellie Wyeth Fox (1)
• Ellis Larkins (1)
• Ellsworth Kelly (1)
• Elsa Schiaparelli (1)
• Elvin Jones (2)
• Emanuele Satolli (1)
• Emily Dickinson (1)
• Emily Eakin (3)
• Emily Jo Gibbs (1)
• Emily Mason (1)
• Emily Nussbaum (3)
• Emily Witt (1)
• Emma Allen (13)
• Emma Cline (2)
• Enrique Vila-Matas (1)
• Eren Orbey (5)
• Eric Helgas (1)
• Eric Hobsbawm (1)
• Eric Klinenberg (1)
• Eric Lach (2)
• Eric Nyquist (1)
• Eric Ogden (3)
• Eric Rohmer (1)
• Erich von Stroheim (1)
• Erin Overbey (6)
• Ernest Hemingway (4)
• Ernest Jünger (1)
• Esquire (1)
• Ethan Iverson (2)
• Ethan Levitas (1)
• Eudora Welty (2)
• Eugène Atget (2)
• Eugène Delacroix (1)
• Eva Hoffman (1)
• Evan Osnos (9)
• Evelyn Waugh (1)
• F. Hopkinson-Smith (1)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
• Faith Ringgold (1)
• Favorite Photo Reviews (10)
• Fido Nesti (2)
• Forty-one False Starts (5)
• Frances Hwang (1)
• Francis Bacon (1)
• Francis Ford Coppola (2)
• Francis Luta (1)
• Francisco de Zurbarán (2)
• Francisco Goldman (2)
• François Lagarde (1)
• Frank Auerbach (2)
• Frank Kimbrough (2)
• Frank O'Hara (1)
• Frank Sinatra (1)
• Frank Stella (1)
• Frank Viva (1)
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1)
• Frans Hals (1)
• Franz Kline (1)
• Fred Astaire (1)
• Fred Kaplan (1)
• Fred Warner (1)
• Fred Wilpon (1)
• Frédéric Bazille (1)
• G. B. Edwards (1)
• Gabriele Stabile (1)
• Gabrielle Hamilton (4)
• Gaby Wood (1)
• Galen Strawson (3)
• Garry Wills (1)
• Garry Winogrand (5)
• Gary Bostwick (1)
• Gary Giddins (2)
• Gary Saul Morson (1)
• Gary Shteyngart (12)
• Gay Talese (2)
• Gazelle Mba (1)
• Geoff Dyer (30)
• Geoffrey O'Brien (2)
• George Ault (2)
• George Bellows (2)
• George Black (1)
• George Cables (2)
• George D. Painter (3)
• George Gershwin (1)
• George Kennan (1)
• George Orwell (3)
• George Packer (6)
• George Qulaut (1)
• George Saunders (1)
• George Segal (2)
• George Steiner (5)
• George Steinmetz (4)
• George V. Higgins (3)
• Georgia O'Keeffe (3)
• Gerald Scarfe (1)
• Gerald Stern (4)
• Gerard ter Borch (1)
• Gideon Lewis-Krauss (4)
• Gideon Mendel (1)
• Gigi Gryce (1)
• Gilbert Rogin (1)
• Giles Harvey (2)
• Gillian Laub (2)
• Ginger Rogers (1)
• Gini Alhadeff (2)
• Gizem Vural (1)
• Glenn Gould (1)
• GOAT Collage #1 (1)
• Goings On About Town (12)
• Golden Cosmos (1)
• Gordon Parks (1)
• Grant Cornett (4)
• Great Plains (3)
• Greg Bellow (1)
• Gregg Toland (1)
• Gretel Ehrlich (1)
• Guardian (1)
• Gus Powell (2)
• Gustav Klimt (1)
• Gustave Flaubert (1)
• H. C. Wilentz (1)
• Hal Foster (1)
• Han Ong (2)
• Hank Jones (1)
• Hannah Aizenman (2)
• Hannah Black (1)
• Hannah Goldfield (51)
• Hans Gissinger (2)
• Harold Ross (1)
• Harper's Magazine (2)
• Harry Levin (2)
• Harry Mulisch (1)
• Harry Warren (1)
• Heami Lee (2)
• Héctor Tobar (2)
• Heidi Julavits (3)
• Helen Frankenthaler (5)
• Helen Garner (1)
• Helen Rosner (13)
• Helen Shaw (2)
• Helen Vendler (34)
• Henri Matisse (3)
• Henrik Kubel (2)
• Henry Alford (1)
• Henry David Thoreau (4)
• Henry James (2)
• Henry Marsh (1)
• Henry Miller (2)
• Henry Worsley (1)
• Herbert Mabuza (1)
• Herman J. Mankiewicz (3)
• Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein (2)
• Hervé Guibert (1)
• High Arctic Haulers (1)
• Hilaire Belloc (1)
• Hilary Mantel (1)
• Hilton Als (10)
• Hisham Matar (2)
• Hogs Wild (8)
• Howard Gardner (1)
• Howard Hawks (4)
• Howard Moss (5)
• Hua Hsu (4)
• Hubert van Eyck (1)
• Iain Sinclair (2)
• Ian Allen (3)
• Ian Buruma (1)
• Ian Crouch (1)
• Ian Frazier (158)
• Ian Parker (8)
• Icinori (1)
• Igor Levit (1)
• Igshaan Adams (1)
• Ilona Szwarc (1)
• Immo Klink (2)
• Ingrid Sischy (1)
• Interesting Emendations (38)
• Iphigenia In Forest Hills (4)
• Iqaluit (1)
• Ira Sachs (1)
• Irina Rozovsky (1)
• Iris Murdoch (1)
• Irving Penn (3)
• Isabel Magowan (1)
• Ismail Kadare (1)
• Istvan Banyai (2)
• Italo Calvino (1)
• Ivan Brunetti (1)
• Ivan Forde (1)
• J. B. Jackson (2)
• J. D. Salinger (1)
• J. M. Coetzee (1)
• Jackson Arn (9)
• Jackson Lears (1)
• Jacqueline Rose (2)
• Jacques de Loustal (3)
• Jake Halpern (3)
• James Agee (6)
• James Fenton (2)
• James Graves (1)
• James Joyce (5)
• James Lasdun (3)
• James Ley (1)
• James Marcus (3)
• James Merrill (4)
• James Nachtwey (2)
• James Schuyler (1)
• James Somers (2)
• James Thurber (2)
• James Wolcott (6)
• James Wood (141)
• Jamie Campbell (1)
• Jamie Hawkesworth (1)
• Jan van Eyck (1)
• Jane Freilicher (5)
• Jane Kramer (8)
• Jane Mayer (2)
• Janet Malcolm (75)
• Janicza Bravo (1)
• Janne Iivonen (1)
• Jason Farago (1)
• Jason Moran (1)
• Javi Aznarez (1)
• Javier Jaén (1)
• Jay Ruttenberg (3)
• Jean Renoir (1)
• Jean Rhys (1)
• Jeannie Suk Gersen (1)
• Jed Perl (3)
• Jeet Heer (1)
• Jeff Connaughton (1)
• Jeff Koons (1)
• Jeff Östberg (1)
• jefferson Hunter (1)
• Jeffrey Frank (1)
• Jeffrey Toobin (5)
• Jennifer B. McDonald (3)
• Jennifer Bartlett (1)
• Jennifer Egan (1)
• Jennifer Gonnerman (1)
• Jennifer Szalai (2)
• Jeremy Denk (2)
• Jeremy Liebman (2)
• Jerome Groopman (5)
• Jerome Kagan (1)
• Jerome Kern (2)
• Jérôme Sessini (2)
• Jerome Strauss (2)
• Jessamyn Hatcher (1)
• Jessica Pettway (1)
• Jessie Wender (2)
• Jiayang Fan (24)
• Jill Lepore (32)
• Jim Fingal (2)
• Jim Jarmusch (1)
• Jimmy DeSana (1)
• Jimmy Jim MacAulay (1)
• Joachim Trier (1)
• Joakim Eskildsen (1)
• Joan Acocella (10)
• Joan Didion (1)
• Joan Eardley (3)
• Joanna Biggs (1)
• Joanna Kavenna (1)
• João Fazenda (4)
• Jody Hewgill (1)
• Johanna Fateman (24)
• Johannes Vermeer (6)
• John Ashbery (5)
• John Berger (2)
• John C. Reilly (1)
• John Cheever (6)
• John Colapinto (2)
• John D'Agata (3)
• John F. Kennedy (1)
• John Gall (2)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan (3)
• John Keats (2)
• John Kinsella (4)
• John Lahr (6)
• John Lanchester (2)
• John Leonard (1)
• John MacDougall (19)
• John McPhee (121)
• John O'Hara (1)
• John Ruskin (2)
• John Russell (1)
• John Seabrook (25)
• John Szarkowski (2)
• John Updike (84)
• John Williams (1)
• Johnny Green (1)
• Jon Lee Anderson (10)
• Jon Michaud (1)
• Jon Qwelane (1)
• Jonathan Blitzer (6)
• Jonathan D. Spence (1)
• Jonathan Dee (1)
• Jonathan Demme (1)
• Jonathan Franzen (7)
• Jonathan Galassi (1)
• Jonathan Raban (24)
• Jordan Awan (1)
• Jorge Arevalo (1)
• Jorge Colombo (7)
• Jorie Graham (1)
• Jose Antonio Vargas (1)
• José Saramago (1)
• Joseph Brodsky (2)
• Joseph Conrad (2)
• Joseph Cornell (1)
• Joseph Lelyveld (1)
• Joseph Michael Lopez (3)
• Joseph Mitchell (22)
• Joseph O'Neill (1)
• Josh Cochran (1)
• Joshua Rothman (4)
• Joshua Yaffa (10)
• Joy Williams (5)
• Joyce Carol Oates (10)
• Juan Gris (1)
• Judith Thurman (20)
• Julia Ioffe (2)
• Julia Margaret Cameron (1)
• Julia Rothman (2)
• Julian Assange (1)
• Julian Barnes (2)
• Julian Bell (8)
• Julian Lucas (2)
• Julie Bruck (2)
• Julieta Cervantes (1)
• Julyssa Lopez (1)
• Justin Chang (1)
• Justin Quinn (1)
• Justin Trudeau (1)
• K. Leander Williams (1)
• Karen Kilimnik (1)
• Karen Solie (2)
• Karl Ove Knausgaard (3)
• Katherine Dunn (1)
• Katherine S. White (1)
• Kathryn Bigelow (1)
• Kathryn Paige Harden (1)
• Kathryn Schulz (8)
• Katie Orlinsky (1)
• Katie Roiphe (1)
• Katori Hall (1)
• Katy Grannan (1)
• Kay Ryan (1)
• Keith Gessen (7)
• Keith Haring (1)
• Keith Negley (2)
• Kelefa Sanneh (11)
• Kelly Reichardt (1)
• Ken Auletta (1)
• Kenneth Clark (1)
• Kenneth Tynan (4)
• Kevin Barry (2)
• Kevin Canty (1)
• Kevin Cooley (1)
• Kevin Dettmar (1)
• Kevin Mattson (1)
• Kevin Moore (1)
• Kirsten Ulve (1)
• Klauss Kremmerz (1)
• Krista Schlueter (2)
• Kyoko Hamada (1)
• Lafcadio Hearn (1)
• Lakin Ogunbanwo (1)
• Landon Nordeman (1)
• Langdon Hammer (1)
• Larissa MacFarquhar (2)
• Larry McMurtry (1)
• Larry Sultan (3)
• László Krasznahorkai (1)
• Laszlo Kubinyi (1)
• Laura Carlin (1)
• Laura Kipnis (1)
• Laura Miller (3)
• Laura Parker (5)
• Laura Preston (5)
• Lauren Collins (39)
• Lauren Hilgers (1)
• Lauren Lancaster (1)
• Laurent Cilluffo (4)
• Laurie Rosenwald (5)
• Laurie Winer (1)
• Lawrence H. Tribe (1)
• Lawrence Joseph (2)
• Lawrence Weschler (1)
• Lawrence Wright (1)
• Le War Lance (3)
• Leanne Shapton (3)
• Lee Gutkind (1)
• Lee Siegel (1)
• Leidy Churchman (1)
• Lena Herzog (1)
• Leo Espinosa (6)
• Leo Robson (9)
• Leo Steinberg (2)
• Leonard Garment (1)
• Leonardo da Vinci (2)
• Leslie Jamison (3)
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1)
• Lev Mendes (3)
• Lewis Thomas (1)
• Liam Hopkins (1)
• Lidija Haas (2)
• Lillian Ross (1)
• Linda Leavell (1)
• Lionel Stevenson (1)
• Lizzie Widdicombe (20)
• Lizzy Harding (1)
• London Review of Books (70)
• Lord Byron (1)
• Lore Segal (1)
• Lorenz Hart (1)
• Lorrie Moore (2)
• Los Angeles Review of Books (10)
• Louis Menand (14)
• Louise Brooks (1)
• Louise Erdrich (2)
• Louise Glück (2)
• Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (2)
• Luca Guadagnino (2)
• Lucas Cranach (1)
• Lucian Freud (2)
• Lucie Brock-Broido (2)
• Lucy Raverat (1)
• Luigi Ghirri (1)
• Luis Grañena (1)
• Luke Mogelson (25)
• Lynda Bengalis (1)
• Lyndon B. Johnson (1)
• Lynn Freehill-Maye (1)
• Lynne Arriale (1)
• M. F. K. Fisher (3)
• M. Patterson (1)
• M. R. O'Connor (2)
• Maeve Dunigan (1)
• Maggie Doherty (1)
• Maggie Nelson (1)
• Mahatma Gandhi (1)
• Maile Meloy (2)
• Maira Kalman (3)
• Malcolm Gladwell (1)
• Malcolm X (1)
• Malika Favre (1)
• Manhola Dargis (1)
• Manning Marable (2)
• Marcel Proust (3)
• Marianne Moore (1)
• Marie Howe (1)
• Marina Warner (1)
• Marius Kociejowski (1)
• Mark Doty (2)
• Mark Ford (1)
• Mark Jarman (1)
• Mark Lyon (1)
• Mark Mazower (1)
• Mark Neville (2)
• Mark O'Connell (4)
• Mark Rothko (4)
• Mark Sandrich (1)
• Mark Singer (18)
• Mark Strand (2)
• Mark Svenvold (1)
• Mark Ulriksen (9)
• Mark Wang (1)
• Martin Amis (11)
• Martin Ansin (1)
• Martin Filler (1)
• Martin Schoeller (1)
• Martin Scorsese (1)
• Marvin Mudrick (1)
• Mary Karr (1)
• Mary Norris (1)
• Mary Price (2)
• Mary-Kay Wilmers (1)
• Masha Gessen (2)
• Matthew Hollister (2)
• Matthew Trammell (10)
• Maureen Gallace (2)
• Mauricio Lima (4)
• Mavis Gallant (3)
• Max Beckmann (2)
• Max Dalton (1)
• Maya Lin (1)
• McKenna Stayner (9)
• Megan Marshall (1)
• Meghan O'Rourke (4)
• Melissa Anderson (1)
• Meredith Jenks (2)
• Merve Emre (7)
• Michael Cavanagh (1)
• Michael Chabon (1)
• Michael Cimino (1)
• Michael Crawford (1)
• Michael Dirda (1)
• Michael Feinstein (1)
• Michael Fried (7)
• Michael Gillette (1)
• Michael Gorra (2)
• Michael Greenberg (1)
• Michael Heizer (1)
• Michael Hofmann (5)
• Michael Ondaatje (1)
• Michael Pearson (1)
• Michael Robbins (2)
• Michael Schulman (5)
• Michael Specter (6)
• Michael Sragow (3)
• Michael Winterbottom (1)
• Michael Wood (5)
• Michaelangelo Matos (8)
• Michel de Montaigne (1)
• Michelle Dean (1)
• Mid-Year Top Ten (15)
• Mike Brodie (1)
• Mike Nichols (2)
• Mike Peed (5)
• Mila Teshaieva (1)
• Mimi Sheraton (5)
• Min Heo (3)
• Min Jin Lee (1)
• Minna Zallman Proctor (1)
• Miriam Toews (1)
• Molly O'Neill (2)
• Molly Rankin (1)
• Morgan Elliott (1)
• Morgan Levy (1)
• Morgan Meis (1)
• Morten Strøksnes (2)
• Muhammad Ali (1)
• Muriel Belcher (1)
• Museums and Women (1)
• N. H. Pritchard (1)
• Nada Hayek (1)
• Nadav Kander (2)
• Nadine Ijewere (2)
• Naila Ruechel (4)
• Namwali Serpell (1)
• Nan Goldin (2)
• Nancy Franklin (1)
• Nancy Liang (1)
• Naomi Fry (2)
• Nate Chinen (1)
• Nathan Heller (10)
• Nathaniel Rich (1)
• Neal Ascherson (1)
• Neil Corcoran (1)
• Neil Sheehan (2)
• Neil Young (1)
• Neima Jahromi (4)
• Nellie McKay (1)
• New York Magazine (1)
• newyorker.com (42)
• Nicholas Breach (1)
• Nicholas Lemann (2)
• Nicholas Schmidle (17)
• Nicholson Baker (4)
• Nick Paumgarten (84)
• Nick Thorpe (1)
• Nicola Twilley (5)
• Nicolas Niarchos (16)
• Nicolas Poussin (1)
• Normal People (1)
• Norman Mailer (9)
• Norman Rockwell (2)
• Nuri Bilge Ceylan (1)
• NYR Daily (6)
• Olimpia Zagnoli (1)
• Oliver Sacks (6)
• On the Prison Highway (2)
• On the Rez (1)
• Orhan Pamuk (2)
• Orson Welles (4)
• Pablo Picasso (5)
• Paige Williams (3)
• Pankaj Mishra (2)
• Paolo Pellegrin (4)
• Pari Dukovic (8)
• Parul Sehgal (8)
• Pat Crow (1)
• Patricia Lockwood (2)
• Patricia Marx (6)
• Patrick Grant (1)
• Patrick Leger (1)
• Patrick Long (1)
• Patrick Radden Keefe (2)
• Patton Oswalt (1)
• Paul Berman (1)
• Paul Bowles (1)
• Paul Cézanne (4)
• Paul Farley (1)
• Paul Goldberger (1)
• Paul Graham (1)
• Paul Greenberg (1)
• Paul Mazursky (1)
• Paul McCartney (2)
• Paul Muldoon (1)
• Paul Rogers (1)
• Paul S. Amundsen (1)
• Pauline Kael (62)
• Pawel Pawlikowski (2)
• Penelope Gilliatt (1)
• Per Petterson (5)
• Personal History (8)
• Peter Bogdanovich (1)
• Peter Brooks (1)
• Peter Campbell (5)
• Peter Canby (2)
• Peter Doig (1)
• Peter Fisher (1)
• Peter Gay (2)
• Peter Hessler (15)
• Peter Jackson (1)
• Peter Schjeldahl (148)
• Peter Stark (1)
• Philip Connors (1)
• Philip Gefter (4)
• Philip Gourevitch (3)
• Philip Guston (2)
• Philip Larkin (7)
• Philip Montgomery (3)
• Philip Roth (2)
• Phillip Lopate (2)
• Phillip Toledano (1)
• Phyllis Ma (1)
• Piero della Francesca (1)
• Piet Mondrian (1)
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1)
• Ping Zhu (3)
• Pola Maneli (1)
• Postscript (16)
• Primo Levi (2)
• Quentin Tarantino (2)
• R. Kikuo Johnson (1)
• R. M. Patterson (5)
• Rachel Aviv (4)
• Rachel Carson (1)
• Rachel Domm (1)
• Rachel Felder (2)
• Rachel Monroe (1)
• Rachel Syme (8)
• Raffi Khatchadourian (18)
• Ralph Steadman (2)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1)
• Rebecca Mead (30)
• Rebecca Monk (2)
• Rebecca West (1)
• Redmond O'Hanlon (14)
• Renata Adler (8)
• Rereadings (4)
• Retrospective Reviews (2)
• Riccardo Vecchio (17)
• Richard B. Woodward (1)
• Richard Brody (85)
• Richard Buckle (1)
• Richard Cobb (1)
• Richard Diebenkorn (2)
• Richard Dorment (1)
• Richard Ellmann (4)
• Richard Franck Smith (1)
• Richard Holmes (1)
• Richard Linklater (1)
• Richard McGuire (1)
• Richard Merkin (1)
• Richard Pevear (1)
• Richard Preston (7)
• Richard Rodgers (1)
• Richard Schickel (1)
• Richard Serra (1)
• Richard Todd (1)
• Rita Dove (1)
• Rivka Galchen (20)
• Rob Brydon (2)
• Rob Fischer (1)
• Rob Garver (1)
• Robert A. Caro (5)
• Robert Adams (1)
• Robert Altman (1)
• Robert Andrew Parker (1)
• Robert B. Pippin (2)
• Robert Bresson (2)
• Robert Coates (1)
• Robert Coles (1)
• Robert Frank (1)
• Robert Gottlieb (2)
• Robert Guédiguian (1)
• Robert Hass (3)
• Robert Irwin (1)
• Robert Kushner (1)
• Robert Lowell (5)
• Robert Macfarlane (4)
• Robert Phelps (1)
• Robert Polidori (1)
• Robert Rauschenberg (3)
• Robert Risko (1)
• Robert Sullivan (29)
• Robert Weber (1)
• Roberto Calasso (1)
• Robin Robertson (1)
• Roe Ethridge (1)
• Roger Angell (9)
• Roger Strauss (1)
• Roland Barthes (6)
• Rollie McKenna (1)
• Roman Muradov (3)
• Ronald Blythe (1)
• Rose Wylie (1)
• Rosecrans Baldwin (1)
• Ross Landenberger (1)
• Route 3 (1)
• Roy Andries de Groot (1)
• Roy DeCarava (1)
• Roy Foster (1)
• Russell Baker (2)
• Ruth Bernard Yeazell (1)
• Ruth Franklin (3)
• Rutu Modan (1)
• Ryan Lizza (2)
• Ryan Ruby (1)
• Ryszard Kapuściński (2)
• S. F. Denton (1)
• Sabine Rewald (1)
• Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (1)
• Sallie Tisdale (3)
• Salman Toor (2)
• Salvatore Siano (1)
• Sam Alden (2)
• Sam Anderson (1)
• Sam Knight (2)
• Sam Shepard (1)
• Sam Sifton (1)
• Sam Wasson (2)
• Sam Youkilis (3)
• Samanth Subramanian (3)
• Samuel Johnson (1)
• Sandra M. Gilbert (1)
• Sanford Schwartz (12)
• Sarah Larson (10)
• Sarah Nicole Prickett (1)
• Sarah Stillman (2)
• Sasha Frere-Jones (8)
• Saul Bellow (5)
• Saul Friedländer (1)
• Saul Leiter (1)
• Saul Steinberg (2)
• Scaachi Koul (1)
• Seamus Heaney (14)
• Sean O'Brien (1)
• Serena Stevens (1)
• Sergei Diaghilev (1)
• Sergiy Maidukov (5)
• Serious Noticing (1)
• Seymour Hersh (1)
• Shae Detar (1)
• Shaped by This Land (1)
• Sharon Olds (1)
• Sharr White (1)
• Shauna Lyon (17)
• Sheila Yasmin Marikar (1)
• Shuffleton's Barber Shop (1)
• Siddhartha Mukherjee (2)
• Siegfried Kracauer (1)
• Sigmar Polke (1)
• Sigmund Freud (1)
• Silo No. 5 (1)
• Silvia Killingsworth (9)
• Simon Callow (1)
• Simon Norfolk (1)
• Simon Schama (5)
• Simon Winchester (1)
• Simone Massoni (3)
• Snowdon (2)
• Sofia Coppola (3)
• Sofia Yates (1)
• Sonny Rollins (1)
• Sophie Brickman (3)
• Sophie Taeuber-Arp (2)
• Sophy Hollington (1)
• Stacy Schiff (2)
• Stag at Sharkey's (1)
• Stanley Cavell (2)
• Stanley Chow (1)
• Stanley Crouch (1)
• Stefanie Augustine (1)
• Stephen Burt (2)
• Stephen Ellis (1)
• Stephen Jay Gould (2)
• Stephen Marche (1)
• Stephen Shore (2)
• Steve Coll (2)
• Steve Coogan (2)
• Steve Futterman (8)
• Steve Pyke (2)
• Steve Wilson (1)
• Steven Pinker (1)
• Steven Soderbergh (1)
• Stuart Jeffries (1)
• Subhankar Banerjee (1)
• Sue Song (1)
• Sundays with Updike (4)
• Susan Eilenberg (1)
• Susan Howe (1)
• Susan McCallum-Smith (1)
• Susan Orlean (6)
• Susan Sontag (16)
• Susan Stewart (1)
• Susan Tallman (2)
• Susannah Clapp (1)
• Susanne Lange (1)
• Sven Birkerts (1)
• Svetlana Alpers (4)
• Sybille Bedford (1)
• Sylvia Grinnell River (1)
• Sylvia Plachy (1)
• Sylvia Plath (1)
• T. J. Clark (16)
• Tables For Two (23)
• Tacita Dean (1)
• Tad Friend (21)
• Taking a Break (5)
• Talia Lavin (12)
• Tamara Shopsin (1)
• Tan Twan Eng (1)
• Tanya Tagaq (1)
• Tara McKelvey (1)
• Tarpley Hitt (1)
• Ted Conover (1)
• Ted Hughes (1)
• Teddy Wilson (1)
• Teju Cole (3)
• Terrance Malick (2)
• Terrance Rafferty (1)
• Terry Eagleton (1)
• The Crossing (3)
• The Egg Men (2)
• The Elements of Style (2)
• The Encircled River (4)
• The Hudson Review (1)
• The Kid with a Bike (4)
• The Long Goodbye (1)
• The New Republic (2)
• The New York Review of Books (109)
• The New York Times (25)
• The New York Times Magazine (10)
• The New York Times Sunday Book Review (23)
• The New Yorker (1136)
• The Painted Drum (1)
• The Paris Review (4)
• The Patch (2)
• The Social Network (4)
• The Talk Of The Town (16)
• The Turkey Season (3)
• The Virginia Quarterly Review (1)
• The Walrus (1)
• Theo Jansen (1)
• Therese Mitchell (1)
• This Cold Heaven (1)
• Thomas Beller (1)
• Thomas Berenato (1)
• Thomas Kunkel (1)
• Thomas Mallon (6)
• Thomas Mann (1)
• Thomas McGuane (1)
• Thomas Meaney (1)
• Thomas Powers (3)
• Thomas Prior (5)
• Thomas Struth (3)
• Thomas Wågström (1)
• Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (1)
• Tim Butcher (6)
• Timothy Ferriss (1)
• Tina Barney (1)
• Tom Bachtell (10)
• Tom Forrestall (1)
• Tom Kizzia (2)
• Tom Smart (1)
• Tom Wolfe (1)
• Toma Vagner (4)
• Tomas Transtromer (1)
• Tommy Flanagan (1)
• Tony Bennett (2)
• Tony Cenicola (1)
• Tony Judt (1)
• Top Ten Exhibition Reviews (10)
• Top Ten New Yorker & Me (4)
• Top Ten New Yorker Pieces 2023 (1)
• Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces (10)
• Toward My Own Theory of Description (12)
• Tracy Kidder (1)
• Travels In Siberia (8)
• Travis B. (1)
• Trent Reznor (1)
• Truman Capote (3)
• Tsukasa Kodera (1)
• Tyler Hicks (1)
• V. S. Pritchett (6)
• Vanessa Bell (1)
• Vanessa Winship (1)
• Verlyn Klinkenborg (6)
• Victor J. Blue (2)
• Victor Schrager (1)
• Victoria Patterson (1)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen (2)
• Vince Aletti (9)
• Vincent Mahé (1)
• Vincent van Gogh (13)
• Vinson Cunningham (4)
• Virginia Woolf (1)
• Vladimir Nabokov (10)
• W. G. Sebald (7)
• W. H. Auden (1)
• W. S. Merwin (1)
• Walker Evans (7)
• Wallace Stevens (3)
• Wayne Koestenbaum (4)
• Wayne Thiebaud (6)
• Wei Tchou (5)
• Wendell Steavenson (1)
• Werner Herzog (1)
• Wesley Allsbrook (1)
• Where the Water Goes (1)
• White Sands (1)
• Whitney Balliett (26)
• Wil Counts (1)
• Wilfrid Sheed (2)
• Wilhelm Sasnal (1)
• Will Counts (1)
• Willa Cather (1)
• William Atkins (1)
• William Blake (1)
• William Carlos Williams (4)
• William Christenberry (1)
• William Eggleston (2)
• William Faulkner (1)
• William Finnegan (14)
• William Gibson (1)
• William Grimes (1)
• William Henry Jackson (1)
• William L. Howarth (2)
• William Logan (1)
• William Maxwell (1)
• William Mebane (12)
• William Murray (1)
• William S. Burroughs (2)
• William Shawn (8)
• William Strunk (8)
• William Styron (1)
• William Zinsser (3)
• Winslow Homer (1)
• Wolfgang Tillmans (2)
• Woody Allen (3)
• Wright Morris (1)
• Xan Rice (1)
• Yashar Kemal (1)
• Yolanda Whitman (2)
• Young Farmers (1)
• Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (1)
• Yudi Ela (1)
• Yuja Wang (1)
• Zach Helfand (1)
• Zachary Fine (2)
• Zachary Lazar (1)
• Zachary Zavislak (1)
• Zack Hatfield (1)
• Zadie Smith (11)
• Zbigniew Herbert (1)
• Zeina Durra (1)
• Zoë Heller (1)
• Zoe Strauss (1)
• Zora J. Murff (2)

Popular Posts

Blog Archive

• ►  February (1)
• ►  March (3)
• ►  April (5)
• ►  May (3)
• ►  June (7)
• ►  July (7)
• ►  August (5)
• ►  September (6)
• ►  October (7)
• ►  November (9)
• ►  December (9)
• ►  January (9)
• ►  February (9)
• ►  March (9)
• ►  April (7)
• ►  May (9)
• ►  June (8)
• ►  July (14)
• ►  August (8)
• ►  September (7)
• ►  October (8)
• ►  November (5)
• ►  December (11)
• ►  January (10)
• ►  February (5)
• ►  March (8)
• ►  May (6)
• ►  June (6)
• ►  July (6)
• ►  August (9)
• ►  October (9)
• ►  November (8)
• ►  December (8)
• ►  January (7)
• ►  February (4)
• ►  April (3)
• ►  July (8)
• ►  August (4)
• ►  November (6)
• ►  December (6)
• ►  January (6)
• ►  February (7)
• ►  April (6)
• ►  May (5)
• ►  July (4)
• ►  October (6)
• ►  February (6)
• ►  March (10)
• ►  April (10)
• ►  May (8)
• ►  August (6)
• ►  November (7)
• ►  December (13)
• ►  January (8)
• ►  March (7)
• ►  April (8)
• ►  June (9)
• ►  July (12)
• ►  September (10)
• ►  December (12)
• ►  April (9)
• ►  May (7)
• ►  June (5)
• ►  July (9)
• ►  August (10)
• ►  September (13)
• ►  October (5)
• ►  January (12)
• ►  September (5)
• ►  December (16)
• ►  May (11)
• ►  June (10)
• ►  August (17)
• ►  September (8)
• ►  October (14)
• John McPhee's "Brigade de Cuisine" Retitled
• October 28, 2019 Issue
• Becka Viau's "Young Farmers"
• November 4, 2019 Issue
• Interesting Emendations: Jonathan Franzen's "The E...
• Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse
• Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": Wolcott v. M...
• November 11, 2019 Issue
• November 18, 2019 Issue
• Describing Nazi and Soviet Prison Camps: Frazier a...
• Dan Kois' "How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman"
• ►  December (15)
• ►  January (16)
• ►  March (12)
• ►  April (11)
• ►  May (15)
• ►  June (13)
• ►  September (12)
• ►  October (13)
• ►  November (12)
• ►  December (19)
• ►  December (17)
• ►  May (10)
• ►  August (11)
• ►  September (17)
• ►  October (10)
• ►  November (10)
• ►  January (13)
• ►  March (11)
• ►  July (21)
• ►  January (11)
• Adam Shoalts, Beyond the Trees (2019)
• Adam Weymouth, Kings of the Yukon (2018)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)
• August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs (2017)
• Ben McGrath, Riverman (2022)
• Bill Buford, Dirt (2020)
• Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland (2023)
• C. K. Williams, On Whitman (2010)
• Charles Simic, The Life of Images (2015)
• Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015)
• Curtis Sittenfeld, You Think It, I'll Say It (2018)
• Eleanor Cook, Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016)
• Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011)
• Geoff Dyer, See/Saw (2021)
• Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022)
• Geoff Dyer, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018)
• Geoff Dyer, White Sands (2016)
• Gideon Lewis-Krauss, A Sense of Direction (2012)
• Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books (2010)
• Helen Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar (2015)
• Ian Frazier, Hogs Wild (2016)
• Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia (2010)
• James Wolcott, Critical Mass (2013)
• James Wood, Serious Noticing (2019)
• James Wood, The Fun Stuff (2012)
• James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (2015)
• Janet Malcolm, Forty-one False Starts (2013)
• Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)
• Janet Malcolm, Nobody's Looking at You (2019)
• Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures (2023)
• Jill Lepore, Joe Gould's Teeth (2015)
• Jill Lepore, The Deadline (2023)
• John Lahr, Joy Ride (2015)
• John McPhee, Draft No. 4 (2017)
• John McPhee, Silk Parachute (2010)
• John McPhee, Tabula Rasa (2023)
• John McPhee, The Patch (2018)
• John Updike, Always Looking (2012)
• John Updike, Higher Gossip (2011)
• Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth (2018)
• Jonathan Raban, Driving Home (2010)
• Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010)
• Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman (2022)
• Julian Bell, Van Gogh (2015)
• Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country (2018)
• Lawrence Osborne, The Wet and the Dry (2013)
• Martin Amis, The Rub of Time (2018)
• Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been? (2014)
• Morten Strøksnes, Shark Drunk (2018)
• Nicholson Baker, The Way the World Works (2012)
• Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time (2010)
• Peter Hessler, Strange Stones (2013)
• Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019)
• Robert Hass, What Light Can Do (2012)
• Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (2012)
• Roger Angell, This Old Man (2015)
• Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish (2010)
• Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans (2020)
• T. J. Clark, Heaven on Earth (2018)
• T. J. Clark, If These Apples Should Fall (2022)
• T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (2013)
• Verlyn Klinkenborg, More Scenes from the Rural Life (2013)
• Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays (2013)
• William Atkins, The Moor (2014)
• Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

John MacDougall

Extremely Online and Wildly Out of Control

Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel explores the mind, and heart, of an internet-addled protagonist.

This article was published online on February 13, 2021.

O n an Instagram account that I like, an illustrator publishes little four-panel drawings of smooth-headed aliens doing normal human things. Two aliens with bodies like slim light bulbs encounter each other against a bubblegum-pink background. One is sitting in a chair, reading a book; the other is just poking its head in, as if to say hello: “What are you doing?” The reading alien looks up from its book. “ Forming emotional bonds, ” it replies.

“If I am successful I will be despondent upon completion.”

“Well I hope you are devastated,” the friend says, warmly.

“Thank you—lowering my defenses,” the reading alien says with a jaunty hand gesture.

In another drawing , an alien gives an earbud to a friend. “Put this in your head,” it says. “I want you to hear vibrations that affect my emotions.” “So that mine are also affected?” the alien’s friend asks. “If all goes as planned,” the first replies.

What I like about this particular cartoon series , called Strange Planet , drawn by the artist Nathan W. Pyle, is that it presents the most mundane human actions—reading a novel, wanting a friend to hear and appreciate your sad music—out of context and in unfamiliar language. We’re so weird , I find myself saying, while snort-laughing, looking at my own behaviors in this frame. Why are we like this?

Recommended Reading

Poet on the Edge

Lucia Berlin’s Harrowing, Radiant Fiction

The Death of the Pioneer Myth

This is the experience—snort-laughter mixed with bewilder­ment at the absolute strangeness of the world in which I participate—that I tend to have when reading Patricia Lockwood, the poet turned memoirist and London Review of Books essayist who has now published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This . The novel follows a protagonist who is “extremely online,” a genius of the “portal,” as the internet is called here, and naturally adept at the cleverness and absurdity of social-media exchange. She has become famous for it. Recently, she has gained worldwide recognition for a post that says, in its entirety, “Can a dog be twins?” Her cat’s name is Dr. Butthole. She travels the world, invited to speak about the portal—both as an interpreter of its patterns and as a performer of its bizarre and hilarious argot.

“Stream-of-consciousness!” she shouts to an audience in Jamaica. “Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-­consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”

These are the driving questions of No One Is Talking About This . What happens to a mind that has enthusiastically joined a worldwide Mind, yet can still occasionally see—if only in flashes—the perversity of the exercise? “Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it?” Lockwood’s narrator notes. Elsewhere: “She had a crystal egg up her vagina. Having a crystal egg up her vagina made it difficult to walk, which made her thoughtful, which counted as meditation.”

Where do these thoughts come from? Who made them? How did it come to be that we now have crystal eggs up our vaginas?

Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to “chug it with her ass.” Already it was impossible to explain these things.

I first encountered Lockwood, as many people did, on Twitter , where she has a large and devoted fandom, and where her current profile bio identifies her as a “hardcore berenstain bare-it-all.” One of the early Twitter projects that won her readers, circa 2011, was a series of “sexts” riffing on what was at the time an ascendant phenomenon of interpersonal communication, and turning it into a poetic mode.

“ Sext : I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me.” “ Sext : I get nude as hell. I write BRA on my boobs and JEAN SHORTS on my pelvis. I walk through a philosophy class and I am not arrested.”

This kind of weird, slyly sophisticated humor, and a deep commitment to the profane as a tool for revelation and critique, are hallmarks of Lockwood’s style. Her high-low panache extends to her fierce and wonderful literary criticism for the London Review of Books , where she’s written about Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Carson McCullers, Joan Didion, and others. About Didion, she remarks: “It would be possible to write a parody of her novels called Desert Abortion—in a Car . Possible, but why? The best joke you could make wouldn’t touch her.”

Despite her concerns about the individual mind’s dilution in the great tidal insanity of Online Discourse, Lockwood is a stylist who only ever sounds like herself. Her first poetry collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012), contains poems with titles like “Killed With an Apple Corer, She Asks What Does That Make Me” and “The Salesmen Open Their Trenchcoats, All Filled With Possible Names for the Watch.” Penguin published her second collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals , in 2014 after one of its poems went viral, a response to a public debate at the time about whether rape jokes could ever be funny, which played out within a larger debate about whether women were categorically less funny than men. “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old,” the poem begins. “The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend … The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living / Not you!”

“Rape Joke” established Lockwood’s talent for speaking the language of the zeitgeist and knifing the zeitgeist’s heart in the same gesture—her ability to win at both humor and lacerating critique. In her 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy , Lockwood recounts growing up as the daughter of one of the only married Catholic priests in the world (her father had been a Lutheran minister, but petitioned to be reordained ), which gives some context to her sensibility: She weaponizes hyperbole and irreverence as only a person raised on Roman Catholicism and then weaned on the internet can. In Priestdaddy , when she’s asked for descriptions of her poetry to fuel “the machinery of book publication,” she considers suggesting as her plaudit: “Electrifying … like if a bumblebee stang you right on the clit.”

From the May 2017 issue: James Parker on Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Priestdaddy’

Lockwood’s affinity for the surreal, for baroque wit, for the sexually weird, for the inane and shocking—for the “worst things the English language is capable of,” as she phrased it to The New York Times Magazine —­has made her one of the most interesting writers of the past 10 years. It has also made her a master of Twitter. ( Her feed remains disturbing and hilarious . In November, she posted the back end of an uncastrated hog, generously endowed. Another time : “Was asked to pitch something to a ‘women’s magazine’ and the first thing that came to mind was ‘Covid Gave Me Really Soft Pubes Like A Chinchilla’ … but on second thought I’ll be saving that for a men’s magazine.”) But in No One Is Talking About This , Lockwood betrays suspicion of the skills that she wields with relish. She turns her critical streak toward the medium in which her writing, and her public life, has been forged.

The first half of No One Is Talking About This has the feeling of an endless scroll—it’s largely made up of brief, one-to-four-sentence increments, approximately tweet-length, rendered in super-close third person. These seem to have little relation to one another chronologically, and they don’t proceed logically. Instead, they are sporadic and self-contained: a joke, a story, a note, a question, a pithy comment. They pass the way social-media feeds pass. “Why were we all writing like this now?” the protagonist wonders. “Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”

The portal, the protagonist realizes, “had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.” She meets people at events on her tours who remember her old blog, and she remembers their blogs. “Tears sparked in her eyes instantaneously … His had been one of her very favorite lives.” But is any of this real? Real to whom? Real in what sense? Anyway, the self (whose self?) devised on the internet vanishes. “Myspace was an entire life,” she half-sobs at an event. “And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!”

The narrator’s endless, directionless tumble in time and language is interrupted by the hard stop of a very offline tragedy. Her younger sister, who is “leading a life that was 200 percent less ironic than hers,” is pregnant, and something has gone terribly wrong. The baby has Proteus syndrome, which causes tissues in some parts of the body to grow far out of correct proportion. The baby’s head is too big: She’s unlikely to survive birth, and certainly won’t survive infancy.

Proteus syndrome is a poetic choice here, an ironic choice even. It is a biological hyperbole suited to the sensibilities of the internet: runaway proliferation turning the body into a wildly exaggerated, Daliesque version of itself. It is surreality visited on the human form. With a less skillful writer, this would be a heavy-handed—or worse, manipulative—plot device, but the baby and her terminal condition turn the book into something unexpected: not a tragedy, but a romance. The baby is born and—improbably—survives, and Lockwood’s narrator is immediately and wholly lovestruck by this tiny creature and her runaway everything. “In every reaching cell of her she was a genius.” She is obsessed with the baby’s body, with the way the baby experiences the world purely physically and not in her mind, or in The Mind.

Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state … The self, but more, like a sponge.

Through this baby, the narrator falls out of the life she spent “with a notebook, painstakingly writing ‘ oh my god—thor’s hammer was a chode metaphor ’ with a feeling of unbelievable accomplishment.” She falls “out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing.” Now she realizes that it doesn’t need her co-writing, and that she maybe doesn’t care.

Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.

Lockwood uses the same language to describe the internet—a broad, warm body; a strong heartbeat—and the fragile corporeality of the baby, though those two domains are mutually incompatible. The baby the narrator can hold in her arms; the baby is broken and holy. The internet is elsewhere, voracious, profane. But they act on her similarly. The internet is a collective reali­ty that swallows and reconfigures us—it is a kind of corpus. And so, of course, is the one truly universal human experience: confronting mortality. The truth of the body that suffers and fails is a reality—a hyper-reality, an inevitability—just as ready to swallow and reconfigure her. Which body does this narrator love? To which does she wish to ultimately belong?

Fortunately, Lockwood doesn’t make her narrator piously renounce her wild tweeting in favor of the “real world,” whatever that might mean. There’s a joke (on the internet) about the “broken brain”—“The internet broke my brain,” people commonly lament. The narrator has a broken brain, still; it’s just that now she has an incandescently broken heart, too. Sitting next to the baby, who is struggling to breathe, she is Googling Ray Liotta’s plastic surgery. She is telling the baby about Marlon Brando because “one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive [is] wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando.” She is grieving and scrolling. Reading this, I suddenly remembered sitting in a hospital room, next to a loved one on a ventilator, and trying to scroll back through years of images online of some random dancer’s nondancing twin to see whether she, too, had a fraught relationship with her arms on account of having been raised in a religious cult. We’re so weird. Why are we like this?

The second half of the book, in which the narrator is newly deranged by the immovable reality of loving what must die—in addition to being deranged by the portal, which feels, by contrast, both eternal and editable—is electric with tenderness. “The doors of bland suburban houses now looked possible, outlined, pulsing—for behind any one of them could be hidden a bright and private glory.” She becomes like the baby, who “could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke.”

Lockwood’s genius for irony is matched by the radiance of her reverence, when she lets it show. A glory, the portal tells her, is also what you call the round rainbow that plane passengers sometimes see haloing the plane’s shadow as it moves through mist. “Every time she looked out the window it was there, traveling fleetly over clouds that had the same dense flocked pattern that had begun to appear on the baby’s skin, the soles of her feet and palms of her hands, so she seemed to have weather for finger and footprints.” Glories follow her through the sky, made only of water and light. Unusually for me, I wept through parts of this book, but in the best, beautiful-sad-music way—a grand success, the aliens would say.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

News, Notes, Talk

Here are a few of John Updike’s kindest, most cutting literary pans.

John Updike, with one notable exception , was an incredibly kind reviewer. Patricia Lockwood, in her London Review of Books survey of Updike’s work , observed Updike’s criticism “was not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of other human beings.” In the introduction to his 1975 collection Picked-Up Pieces , his list of rules for literary criticism began thus: “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.”

This empathy is also what makes his criticism so cutting, when it is: it’s done with a deep understanding of the reviewed work’s goal, and a generosity and willingness to praise what is good. I see what you’re attempting, a noble task, says the review; Here are your many good qualities; and, before I go, I noticed that you have—by the rules you’ve set out for yourself—a tiny problem which knocks down the house of cards that is your book. Like a kind coach clapping the authors he reviews on the shoulder, saying, Better luck next time ! Here are some of Updike’s kind-but-unkind takedowns:

On Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown :

Verbal hyperactivity of the sissy-Assisi sort nudges the hip reader on page after page . . . James Joyce and T. S. Eliot established brainy allusions as part of modernity’s literary texture, but at the risk of making the author’s brain the most vital presence on the page . . . His fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music . . . gives his fiction a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel.

On Flann O’Brien’s career and At-Swim-Two-Birds :

His novels begin with a swoop and a song but end in an uncomfortable murk and with an air of impatience . . . The elder Trellis is kept immobilized in his bed by surreptitiously drug-induced sleep while his characters, including a number of American cowboys recruited from the novels of one William Tracy, run wild. At least, that’s what I think is happening.

On Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[The novel,] on its local ground, seems thinner, overextended, and sentimentally watery . . . Foer is, I would say, a naturally noisy writer—a natural parodist, a jokester, full of ideas and special effects, keen to keep us off balance and entertained. The novel’s very title, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” suggests the kind of impact he wants to make on the reader. But a little more silence, a few fewer messages, less graphic apparatus might let Foer’s excellent empathy, imagination, and good will resonate all the louder.

On Robert Alter’s translation of The Five Books of Moses:

In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new translations abound.

On Norman Rush’s Mortals :

Ray Finch, the hero of Norman Rush’s lengthy new novel, “Mortals,” finds many things annoying . . . Iris and Ray have been married for seventeen years, and she gives signs of having the seventeen-year itch. This is less surprising to the reader than to Ray, who is perhaps the most annoying hero this reviewer has ever spent seven hundred pages with.

. . . It is annoying, one could say, that a novel demonstrating so acute, well-stocked, and witty a sensibility is such a trial to read.

On Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full :

A Man in Full . . . amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.

Well, that one was mean. Happy birthday, John Updike!

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)

to the Lithub Daily

April 9, 2024.

• On Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the power of pleasure
• Maggie Nelson talks to Lauren Michele Jackson
• The most challenged books of 2023 are probably exactly what you expect

Lit hub Radio

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood

[Riverhead; 2021]

When I first encountered Patricia Lockwood in her spirited reappraisal of John Updike in the London Review of Books , it felt like a revelation. Insight, asperity, un-pompous erudition — the perfect potion, it seemed — spilled delightfully onto the page. Here was a writer worth watching.

A quick Internet search told me that I was late to the party, as she’d already established a reputation as a poet and author of an acclaimed memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), while publishing essays and cultural criticism. So the release of her first novel, No One Is Talking About This , was much-anticipated, not merely in terms of media buzz, but by real readers, by which I mean, of course, myself.

Written in fragments, the novel is divided into two sections, centered on an unnamed protagonist who is an Internet celebrity and expert on digital media, pursuing her career on the international lecture circuit. The first part depicts her as nervously at home in these elements, surveying the virtual landscape and the evolving virtual inscape while traversing the planet’s time zones. In all contexts, the Internet, Twitter et al. are collectively referred to as “the portal.”

The second part of the novel shifts to a crisis in the non-virtual world, where the protagonist’s sister experiences a harrowing pregnancy and the birth of a baby with a rare genetic disorder called Proteus syndrome. Born blind and suffering from a grave assortment of health issues, the infant survives only six months, but during her brief life, she inspires a deep, transformative love in the sisters.

The stark contrast between the two parts is crucial to the novel’s design. One could imagine the author riffing longer in the first part and writing a timely stand-alone “Internet novel.” As the narrator asserts, “All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.” Or, similarly, the author could have developed the second part into a memoir-inflected autofiction.

Instead, by presenting these contrasting parts as a whole, Lockwood attempts something more ambitious, formally speaking. Overall, I don’t think the novel succeeds — more about that later — but in its best moments, the stylized fragments of No One is Talking About This are original and compelling. Here, she conveys a perception of police violence:

The labored officious breathing of the policemen, which was never the breathing that stopped. The poreless plastic of nightsticks, the shields, the unstoppable jigsaw roll of tanks, the twitch of a muscle in her face where she used to smile at policemen . . .

Both visceral and minutely observed (“poreless plastic”), this description might lazily be described as “poetic” but that would miss the mark. Although the author is also a poet, her prose offers a welcome reminder that poetry has no monopoly on sensuous language. Some novelists write as if the bare pine aesthetic of an Ikea bookshelf has leached into their style; Lockwood wants nothing of this. Consider the passage when the protagonist meets her newborn niece:

All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.

Until this moment, the main character has been preoccupied with trying to capture the “communal stream-of-consciousness” of the portal. She chronicles its antic dippiness and aleatory profundity, while musing about its effects on fashion, language, politics, and consciousness itself. Many of these fragments are cleverly done, but they’re not exactly news. I was reminded of Jennifer Egan’s inclusion of a PowerPoint format in A Visit from the Goon Squad, which might have felt technically daring in 2011 but now, only a decade later, seems quaint. There’s a similar problem here, as web novelty is dated as soon as the pixel fades.

This problem is most palpable in fragments which rely less on wit than on a kind of whimsy. Lockwood’s frankness can be refreshing but sometimes her ear fails her. Words like butthole or ass are treated as cutely transgressive — there’s definitely a puritanical edge here — and the protagonist enjoys chuckling at her own jokes. Though she supposedly travels extensively, there are few cultural particulars as countries blend into a duty-free pudding, where everybody speaks English and there is scant intimation of places outside of a touristic comfort zone. The same is true of the portal: it’s a monolingual monolith. For all its expressed angst about current American political woes (racism, violence, Trump as “dictator,” etc.) or hip cringing at old pop culture (“Sweet Caroline”), the novel evinces an unwitting sort of American triumphalism.

Thus, the second part of No One is Talking About This provides a salutary jolt. Here, the protagonist finds herself utterly disarmed by a baby whose condition defies easy answers or facile questions about “what does this meme?” Another world beckons, full of menace and promise, as she feels attracted to the child.

“I can do something for her,” she tried to explain to her husband, when he asked why she kept flying back to Ohio on those rickety $98 flights that had recently been exposed as dangerous by Nightline. “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has — I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?

Like an observer in a 21 st century version of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” she has concluded: you must change your life. Only in her case, the inspiration is not art but life itself, in one of its most challenging iterations. She becomes devoted to the baby, sharing with it as much life as she can. Songs, the sensation of a dog’s tongue on her body. Her own physical contact. And when the baby dies, there is the inevitable question of what it all meant. This is evoked in a conversation with a doctor:

The doctor took a bite of bagel and shaped his mouth the great word why . “When Jesus met the blind man, his disciples asked him why — was it the man’s sin, was it the sin of his parents? And Jesus said it was no one’s sin, that it happened so that God might move us forward, through and with and in that man.” Tears stood without falling in the doctor’s blue eyes; that is the medicine, she thought. “If I can do anything . . .” he said chokingly, with a slight amount of cream cheese in his mustache, which increased her love for the human race, which moved her forward through, with, in him, which was also for the glory of mankind.

This passage raises many questions about suffering and existence, and of course it’s not a flaw in a novel if these questions remain unanswerable or are selectively filtered through a character. Here and elsewhere the protagonist experiences an awakened love for humanity and a movement forward which is also for “the glory of mankind.” Her sister says of her valiant efforts with the dying child, “I would’ve done it for a million years.”

But here’s another question, largely unaddressed: how much can we instrumentalize the suffering of others? It is precisely the suffering of children that prompts Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion, his desire to “return the ticket.” Clearly Lockwood embraces another narrative, perhaps one of mystery (“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God tells Job), and that is indeed an answer with a long (and for some, venerable) history. But, in a novel couched in the religious terms that Lockwood is using, Ivan and his rebellious ilk ought to have at least been given a hearing, if only to be rejected. It would have been interesting to see how a writer of Lockwood’s talents would confront the question.

My first impression that Patricia Lockwood is a writer worth watching remains intact. But No One is Talking About This is an uneven performance. Its style cannot fix its gaps. The world of the portal described here is less a world than a province of the U.S.A. Its voice is powerful but unrelieved by other voices, by a readiness to put into question its own articulateness. That said, this is a wildly ambitious novel, so even a qualified success, or failure, is to its credit.

C harles Holdefer is an American writer based in Brussels. His work has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His latest book is AGITPROP FOR BEDTIME (stories) and his next novel, DON’T LOOK AT ME, will be released in 2021. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com

This post may contain affiliate links.

Full Stop Quarterly: Fall 2023

Out latest issue illuminates the role of literature, art, and other cultural practices in contemporary social movements related to the land. Read the introduction here.

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

Celebrating one of the most significant american writers of the 20th century.

Is John Updike a ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’?

That’s the charge Patricia Lockwood levels after she’s charged with reading and reviewing Novels, 1959-65: The Poorhouse Fair; Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; Of the Farm, by John Updike for the London Review of Books . And she skewers Updike with the kind of zest the likes of which haven’t been seen since David Foster Wallace (quoted here) used to pillory Updike (“a penis with a thesaurus”) and other “Great White Male Narcissists.” It’s almost as if she’s hoping one of her own derogatory turns-of-phrase will be likewise immortalized.

She confesses her bias openly, in the first paragraph:  “I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.” She writes, “In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on. . . . Today, he has fallen even further, still, in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad. There’s so much of him, spread over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike. . . . The more I read of him the more there was, like a fable.”

“When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong—which is often—you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present in the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. Janice is a grotesquerie with a watery drink in one hand and a face full of television static; her emotional needs are presented as a gaping, hungry and above all unseemly hole, surrounded by well-described hair. He paints and paints them but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on Tuesday. In the scene where Janice drunkenly drowns the baby, it wasn’t the character I felt pity for but Updike, fumbling so clumsily to get inside her that in the end it’s his hands that get slippery, drop the baby.”

Patricia Lockwood is a poet whose memoir, Priestdaddy , was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times . Her full review—in the London Review of Books Vol. 41 No. 19, 10 October 2019, the Anniversary Issue: Part One—isn’t just a hatchet job. It’s a thorough and thoughtful reconsideration of Updike then through the eyes of a woman now , and that’s fascinating.  The #metoo movement has claimed a number of casualties, most of them deserved. But it has to leave today’s male writers wondering if any of them can ever be as completely honest as Updike was about  sex and relations with women, or if that ship has sailed . . . and long ago sunk.

One thought on “ Is John Updike a ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’? ”

I think that the parts where she finds Updike the most bad, is probably where a subsequent generation will find him most adventurous. Atwood said Updike is someone who put a lot of time wondering how it would be to be a woman. She did not follow it by saying… yet somehow he got the whole damn thing wrong! Or not as I remember.

Defending him, really defending him in not a hey, this is my dad you’re talking about! way, is like defending post-war psychoanalysis. You’re doomed unless you equivocate to the moon. He’s a sitting duck, that’ll get the full defence he deserves sometime outside our time. In the meantime, don’t bother, and read the authors reviewers like this one like, the current ones, for there’s momentum there, and it’s lovely to participate where the best and brightest of today feel the truly serious lies. You’ll surprise yourself in finding it’s growth you didn’t know you needed, even if it’s not equivalent to spending time with what a subsequent generation would have given you, which is the current gen’s less rage, more emotionally quieted psyche/less requirement of re-directed revenge, but who also have less need of a creative culture built to enfranchise so little that amounts to few truly powerful shocks.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“The House of God,” a Book as Sexist as It Was Influential, Gets a Sequel

By Rachel Pearson

In 1978, the psychiatrist Stephen Bergman published the novel “ The House of God ,” written under the pen name Samuel Shem. Based on Bergman’s experiences as an intern at Harvard’s Beth Israel hospital, the book rapidly became a staple of any medical resident’s required-reading list; to date, it has sold more than two million copies. A 2003 edition included an introduction by John Updike, who wrote that “The House of God” “could probably not be written now, at least so unabashedly; its lavish use of freewheeling, multiethnic caricature would be inhibited by the current terms ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ and ‘ageist.’ Its ’70s sex is not safe.”

For Updike, for those who made this argument before him, and for those who continue to make it today, a measure of freedom has been lost in a culture that requires writers to watch their words for unintended cruelty. An army of chiding librarians seems to have arisen, tsk-tsk-ing the poor writer’s bawdy, outrageous imagination. Updike’s concern is embodied in the real phenomena of Twitter pile-ons and sensitivity readers, but it is also Foucauldian: the chiding librarian is within us, suppressing the writer’s creativity before it even makes it to the page. In the panopticon where every action can be seen, known, and embedded in a tweet, no actual chains are required. Ultimately, we control ourselves.

“The House of God” is “not a great book,” the literary critic Kathryn Montgomery has written, “but it is an important book.” Bergman claims that it shows how residents are dehumanized in the course of their sleepless, gruelling medical training, and in turn begin behaving cruelly or carelessly toward their patients. As the physician and poet Jack Coulehan has pointed out, however, Bergman undercuts his argument somewhat when his narrator, Roy Basch, refers to patients as “a heifer” and “a hippo” on his first day of work. If the narrator’s callous attitude toward patients is a product of the dehumanizing power of residency training, how did Basch get there so quickly? Coulehan argues that the novel does a disservice to medical-student readers, who “internalize the message that clinical training is dehumanizing without sufficiently noticing that the group most dehumanized is patients.” Others, such as the emergency physician Jay Baruch, argue that the novel’s descriptions of the disgust, shame, and horror that patient care sometimes evokes comprise a badly needed articulation of the lived experience of residents. “The House of God” likely contributed to some of the reforms in medical training that have come about since the nineteen-seventies, particularly in regard to long work hours that lead to sleep deprivation. The book is taught in medical schools and quoted by physicians; whether we realize it or not, we are quoting “The House of God” when we say, for example, “The first procedure in any cardiac arrest is to take your own pulse.”

More than forty years after its publication, many of the book’s episodes, such as the suicide of an intern , still feel contemporary. Other bits are frighteningly dated or always felt slanted, particularly the portrayal of women. The book’s nurses have none of the clinical insight or skill of actual nurses, but they’re eager to reveal their montes pubis for the interns. There is just one female physician, a frigid, universally loathed character named Jo. The last of the women is Roy Basch’s partner, Berry, who is intelligent but inexplicably content to serve as a surrogate mother for Basch, while displaying no expectation that he might broaden her horizons in turn, or even refrain from copulating with nurses.

As sympathetic as I am to Updike’s concerns about social control, and as nostalgic as I may be for the time when I wrote like a child—blithe, mindless of consequence, the only audience in my mind an audience of people who already loved me—I am no longer a child. These days, I write not only for my best friends but for general readers. Growing up involves coming to realize that others are as human as oneself, with inner lives at least as rich as one’s own. The realization that others have inner lives is a developmental milestone that we humans are supposed to achieve around age four. But, as it turns out, many of us are still working on it, decades later. Or perhaps we gain the ability to imagine the lives of others around age four, but we may or may not put that ability into practice.

I look to literature to attune my mind to the inner lives of other people, and it is painful when a book falls so short of deeply imagining the other that it portrays some whole wings of the world as flat, airless, not truly worth inhabiting. It is ironic, in a sick way, when the art that ought to bring us closer accidentally insists that some of us are not really worth the effort. I read “The House of God” in medical school, as many of us do, and was left looking askance at my chosen field. Because the book is lionized so uncritically in my profession, I could only suspect that my future colleagues did not hold women in particularly high regard.

Bergman and his apologists (including many of my women colleagues in medicine) say that “The House of God” was simply a novel of its time. When asked about the novel’s sexism in a recent interview, Bergman replied, “I was roundly criticized for the way women were seen” in the book, then launched into an anecdote about a doctor and nurse having sex in an on-call room in the nineteen-seventies. “Things have changed,” Bergman added. The anecdote is telling, with its implication that feminist thinkers object to sex itself, rather than to the portrayal of women as sex objects. The accusation that women who display the capacity for critical thought must be frigid is a tired one, and one given full treatment in the character of Jo—the only woman in “House” who occupies a position of authority, the “lonely single woman” whose supervision of Basch and her other male subordinates equates to “lop[ping] a bit off his schlong daily by telling him what he’d failed to do.”

Other authors have managed to see women in health care as complex humans: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in “ Cancer Ward ”; Michael Ondaatje, in “ The English Patient ”; Elizabeth Norman, in the beautiful and deeply researched “ We Band of Angels .” As more women have trained as medical professionals, physician writers such as Danielle Ofri, Pauline Chen, the former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, and the Navajo surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord have told our stories in memoirs. Part of a book’s essential work is to bring readers deeply into the worlds of others, and thus it is fair to criticize authors who make no attempt to examine the worlds of whole categories of people. As Eudora Welty said of her stories and novels, “What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.” It is odd to blame the times, then, for a failure of imagination—that freewheeling, unabashed thing that Updike prized.

The other defense of “The House of God” that I commonly hear is “But it’s satire!” And “The House of God” is wonderfully effective satire insofar as it points an accusatory finger at systems of power in medicine. But the spectacle of the male Harvard Medical School graduate satirizing women colleagues is painful; good satire deflates systems of power, not the people who toil and suffer in those systems.

Naturally, I turned to “ Man’s 4th Best Hospital ,” the recent sequel to “The House of God,” with cautious curiosity. I wondered if a forty-year career as a psychiatrist could have acquainted Bergman with the notion that women have inner lives. The novel’s first sentence—“Except for her eyes, Berry is fully clothed”—dimmed my hopes only somewhat. Roy Basch is back, and his life in the years between the two books maps closely with Bergman’s. Both men married a psychologist who believes that profound and fixed differences between genders not only exist but also can begin to be bridged by using the word “we” more frequently; both adopted a daughter from overseas; both became psychiatrists with a special focus on addiction medicine; both wrote a novel called “The House of God.”

In the first chapter, Basch and Berry are staying at their Costa Rican finca, and Basch requires stitches from a Tica physician. “When she bent over to examine me,” he describes, “I could not help noticing that her purple blouse was—to use a line from The House —‘unbuttoned down past Thursday,’ breasts cradled in the lace palms of a pink bra. . . . As she left . . . I noticed she was wearing tight bright pink pants and red high heals—make that heels.” For Basch, this is “familiar ground: sex and death. Especially in the Medical Intensive Care Unit, in the daily horror of lingering disease and death, the healthy sex with the nurses, orgasms crying out We’re still alive and young! At the threat of disease and death, the sensual, the vital—and, yes, the hope.”

Now, I happen to be a woman physician. I can’t speak for the whole crowd of us, but I think that most of us do not wish for our breasts to be ogled while we stitch—even if it makes our septuagenarian patients feel “sensual” and “vital.”

Even if Basch’s ogling of the doctor is nauseating, his point about the erotics of medicine has something true in it. All that death does make one wish to prove that one is alive oneself, and that life offers something more exalted than excretion and suffering. Sex is a high line to pleasure, and I have friends both male and female who did fornicate their ways around the cities of their internship. Mostly we were too tired for fornication, though, or we were in love with our spouses and sensible enough to be faithful to the ones who kept us fed and sane. There is an actual orgy in the call room in “The House of God” which, in retrospect, feels quaint. What intern has time for an orgy these days? You would get paged out of it within ten minutes.

(It occurs to me that I am a pediatrician, and it could just be that children’s hospitals are particularly undersexed. Perhaps, in adult hospitals, the loamy must of sex luffs up around bedpans and ventilators, and interns must splash through puddles of semen to get to their call-room beds. I’ve no way to know!)

Although many of the characters, including the physicians, in “Man’s 4th Best Hospital” are women, and, although Bergman has gotten beyond the trope of nurse as dumb mons, his depiction of gender is still old-fashioned. Men are strong and zany and ha-ha funny; women are sensitive and moral and wise, happy either to bed the men or to mother them. (Berry refers to Basch’s moral education as her “full-time job in the medical field.”) In one memorable scene, a nurse named Molly allows Basch to come up to her apartment and fondle her “remarkably caressable breasts and strangely long nipples,” for old times’ sake, then does him the service of reminding him of his wife’s existence, putting an end to the dalliance before penetration can occur. The virile Basch’s formidable sex drive is thwarted, but later he is grateful and falls to his knees on the sidewalk—thank goodness Berry never needs to know! Molly goes on to work alongside Berry when she, too, joins the clinic. There is minimal drama and no consequences for Basch—a male fantasy fulfilled, even if there was no penetration.

The other aspects of Basch’s privilege also go unexamined, and his flaunting of his privilege as a doctor and a wealthy person makes me, as a fellow-physician, cringe. At one point in “Man’s 4th Best,” Basch develops an abnormal heart rhythm and has to go to the hospital. He calls a fellow-doctor en route, and that doctor promises to get a cardiologist to come in and care for Basch. Once at the hospital, Basch continues to lobby for special treatment:

I had learned that if I—or any of my family—go to a doctor, it’s helpful to say I’m a doctor, and when they ask what kind, I tell them and then ask, ‘Have you heard of the novel The House of God? ’ Almost always they perk up and say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s my favorite book!’ ‘Well, I wrote it.’ … And then the word spreads throughout the [emergency ward] and we all get a lot of attention. Docs and nurses crowd the room, want to chat, almost always telling me where they were when they’d read my novel.

For anyone who has struggled to receive proper attention from physicians, this passage could be a little hard to take. It is also difficult to feel sympathy with the Basch family for their financial troubles, which condemn them to owning a vacation finca and also a large Boston-area estate and confine them only to the carriage house of the estate while they rent out the main house. Basch goes into an alcoholic tailspin from the stress of working extra shifts in order to afford their adopted daughter’s private preschool. (“My 24,000 dollar city taxes would have paid for excellent public school,” he explains. “But we’d tried it with Spring—it didn’t work. She was terribly shy.”)

I have many shortcomings as a human, and one of them is my failure to sympathize with the struggles of the wealthy to secure private-school spots for their children. I was so shy that my preschool teachers thought that I had a developmental disability, and I still managed to survive public school in rural Texas, where abstinence-only sex education ruled the day and where we dissected a single rat that we shared as a class. Now I am not only a doctor but also some kind of arbiter of taste, called upon by The New Yorker to review this book. All this unexpected glory, despite having shared the rat. I’m sure that I was protected by old-fashioned white privilege in public school; I was urged to the front of the class. The parents who really have to worry about the fates of their children in public school rarely have the luxury of choice.

Nor should Updike have worried that the “racist” label would eliminate “free-wheeling multiethnic caricature” from Bergman’s writing. “House” employed caricatures of black and Irish-American people, among others. Bergman portrays Navajo people as fully realized characters in “Man’s 4th Best,” but a Latino physician character is still a racist parody whose Spanish is incorrect. “Mia madre!” he says, and “Esta mucho discombobulay,” and “El segundo causa,” and “Merck Vioxx kill my madre!”—and it is unclear if this Spanish is deliberately incorrect or if it has simply been believed to be correct, in a country where literate Spanish speakers are abundant and could correct it.

Basch frequently nods to the struggles of the working class, or, as he refers to them, “all the poor and middle-class patients I’d seen who were only one illness away, in our nation’s piss-poor health-care system, from bankruptcy.” And the explicit mission of the book is to “make medicine humane again.” (Boring!) The book advocates, in its way, for universal access to health care as a cure not only for physical suffering and injustices in the system but also for the misery of physicians. Given these explicit missions, Shem’s tone-deaf approach to the narrative effects of privilege-flaunting is unfortunate.

In recent months, since I finished residency and began working as an attending physician, my way has been smoothed by the grunt work and flattery of trainees. My residents mine the electronic medical record for data and compose my notes; my medical students actually laugh out loud at my jokes. I recognize the precarity of all this, the seductive notion that this deference is not a consequence of a pernicious hierarchy but rather a consequence of my own hard work, wisdom, and virtue. I hope always to deserve the respect of my team. I hope never to be the dupe making sexist jokes that aren’t funny, to whom nobody in the room is willing to tell the truth. I hope to remember that I am a wealthy person now, and hand-wringing about the cost of private preschool would render me as unsympathetic as a self-appointed advocate for the oppressed.

Perhaps forty years of deference explain why Shem, like Updike, writes as a child would, imagining an audience that will express only adoration. Perhaps it explains why Basch presumes that his book is everybody’s favorite, and that the doctors and nurses in the E.R. are gathering round to admire him. Some of them undoubtedly are, but a good portion of them are just staring at a fascinating specimen. We medical folk are simple people, and a famous writer in the E.R., like a case of Sydenham’s chorea or an interestingly shaped object lodged in a rectum, excites our general interest.

So what is enough to ask of an elder male writer in this era? I think we women want revenge; we want “blood on the ceiling,” as Patricia Lockwood gave us in her recent epic takedown of Updike , in the London Review of Books . But also, perhaps, we want the possibility of individual moral progress, particularly among powerful men who have used their power to demean us. We want to recognize that progress when it comes, even as we continue to deserve real justice. Even if I would not wish to be or know the women in Bergman’s book, I recognize an effortful appreciation of women here. In medicine, we are only just beginning to reckon with our gender-based wage gap , our failure to promote women leaders, our utter indifference to the needs of working mothers, and the systematic harassment of women trainees. Led by groups like Time’s Up Healthcare, we are beginning to discuss these things. It is all too slow, and, on my more exhausted days, I wish for torches and pitchforks rather than just these words.

Jo, the only female resident in “The House of God,” is also the only resident from that book who does not reappear in “Man’s 4th Best Hospital”; she doesn’t even rate a mention. Her character was instructive to me when I first read “The House of God,” because she symbolized so precisely the implicit threats levied against women who seek a career in medicine: that, if we do this unfeminine work, we will become hard and cold. If we assume leadership positions, the men we supervise will see us as schlong-lopping harpies.These threats are powerful tools of social control, instructing women in medicine that we must contort ourselves somehow into sexually available playthings, even as we thread catheters into femoral arteries and stuff tubes down the throats of the dying. For refusing to be pretty or sexy or soft, Jo was hated.

I would have liked to see Jo return, to see the consequences of her treatment in “The House of God” explored many years later. I would like to know if we women in medicine—particularly those who have been harassed and demeaned and underpaid—get to live full lives, after all. I would like to know if we ever get to be both women physicians and people, or if the two conditions are incompatible.

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Leslie Jamison

Patricia Lockwood on the Absurdity of Modern Life and Being Too Online

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

“The portal” is a mélange of observations (“Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money”) and imagistic curios (“a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection,” memorably). A critic for Bookforum marveled of Lockwood: “Reading her metaphors is like watching someone pull out a scalpel and cut the cleanest line you’ve ever seen, and then in the next sentence throw the knife over her shoulder with her eyes closed, grinning.” In a whiplash shift of tone, the novel’s second half shifts the stakes from digital absurdities to heartsick circumstances around early mortality and deep loss.

No One Is Talking about This

Lockwood spoke to ELLE.com via email about rethinking approaches to history, replicating internet behavioral patterns in literature, and the real necessity of charging one’s phone in a separate room at night.

Why the title No One is Talking About This ? What is being overlooked?

I liked the idea of there being an echo of internet language in the title, something almost co-written, that had been passed from hand to hand and put to many different purposes. And the protagonist puts the line to her own purpose in the second half of the book; she speaks of wanting to stop people in the hallways, grip them by the arm, and tell them what is happening to her and the people she loves. “Do you know about this? No one is talking about this!” I think in that moment, “this” becomes an all-encompassing word, able to contain anything, even a whole human life.

Can you elaborate on form and the decision to create these ultra-short vignettes, or glimpses? How do they coalesce into a novel?

I don’t think I could’ve written it any other way—I had to work in the portal’s own form. The book had to resemble that reading experience, both in its fragmented nature and its sense of falling through a series of someone else’s thoughts.

And as for it coalescing, part of the danger and the exhilaration of working on a book like this is that you don’t know if it ever fully does. It’s like the mercury the protagonist speaks of in the novel’s second half; the beads of it are always trembling toward each other, trying to come together into one shining piece.

Can you talk about the two parts? Why unite these disparate-feeling moods?

“Disparate-feeling moods” is probably an understatement, haha. The first part takes place mostly inside the internet, so we see the protagonist’s face lit by that gentle blue glow. The second part is set in the heart of her family, and the light is that fluorescent light that we experience in the most urgent human situations. I united those moods for the simple reason that life unites them: Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.

.css-1aear8u:before{margin:0 auto 0.9375rem;width:34px;height:25px;content:'';display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1aear8u:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/elle/static/images/quote.fddce92.svg);} .css-1bvxk2j{font-family:SaolDisplay,SaolDisplay-fallback,SaolDisplay-roboto,SaolDisplay-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1bvxk2j b,.css-1bvxk2j strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1bvxk2j em,.css-1bvxk2j i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1bvxk2j i,.css-1bvxk2j em{font-style:italic;} “Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.”

The book at once skewers absurdist aspects of the internet but also conveys that absurdity is a modern cultural currency—that it's part of what it’s important to be knowledgeable about, to be in on the joke. For example: “They were going to remember, ‘Can a dog be twins?’ instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.” How do you sift through these kinds of things yourself? That is to say: How do you determine your own informational hierarchies?

Are we even in charge of our own informational hierarchies? I don’t know the date of the Treaty of Versailles, but in its place I’m storing the memory of that video a woman made to explain Gritty to the French. “Gritty is popular because of nihilism. For some time, Americans have felt that life has no meaning. Gritty also has no meaning.” It might seem that we have willfully and obstinately chosen the path of the absurd, but I think we have done so for a reason. The stones of history—the facts, the dates, the interpretations—no longer march in any sort of order, and neither does there seem to be an overarching narrative to modern life. How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.

In a 2014 New York Times profile , you stated, of your approach to reading: “I wasn’t concerned about taste…I wanted to know things.” Has this remained true over time? As someone working as a literary critic for the LRB , you might now be considered a tastemaker yourself.

Perhaps I should have said that I wasn’t concerned about having good taste, because I knew that was a standard I would never meet. But this knowledge freed me too. It allowed me to…hunt my own Bigfoot, is what I wanted to write, so I’ll just go with that. I was able to be idiosyncratic in my reading, my obsessions, the literary routes I traveled. As for my own criticism, I do write about a lot of dead people, and it’s hard to be wrong about dead people in a way that anyone cares about. So I wouldn’t describe myself as a tastemaker so much as a little freaky clerk in the dead letter office, or a silverfish that has turned completely transparent in a library.

Does being a literary critic shape, or seep into, being a writer?

As a critic you pay more attention to structure—you often have to reverse-engineer a novel in order to think about it roundly. So probably some of those thoughts about structure do make their way into my own work, buttress it a bit, give it a nice bony nose. But my turn as a critic is also fairly recent, within the last few years, and I developed my voice and my aesthetic long before I thought of writing from the other side.

“How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.”

I love that Lisa Hanawalt did some of your previous covers . How did that collaboration come about?

2011 Twitter was truly a wild wild west; we followed each other early on and I think I just asked her! I even paid myself for her cover art for Balloon Pop Outlaw Black , which I love so much. We definitely share an aesthetic that is very centered on the body but also out in space, shooting starlight from every hole. Cartoonish, in the most playful sense of the word.

Do you often have a visual vision of your work?

I do often have a vision of my work—I’m an unusually visual reader and that extends to my writing as well. I experience individual words as both images and tactile sensations, which I guess qualifies as synesthesia, though my form of it is not very flashy. Actually, I had a bit in the book for a while that talked about the protagonist’s “overly literal case of synesthesia, where she saw ice cubes when she read the word “refrigerator” and heard a fife whenever she thought about the Revolutionary War, and that’s pretty much me.

Do you have an internet routine or any kind of parameters you set for yourself? What is considered too online, and how often do you tip over?

It’s the easiest rule, and so impossible to live by: Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning! Charge it in another room, so you don’t wake up at 4 a.m. and accidentally learn something new from British Twitter about Piers Morgan! No, when I’m living my best life I’m surrounded by books and pens and papers until three or four in the afternoon, totally absorbed, with a cat spread completely across my notebook because she hates all my ideas and wants me to become a tuna fisherman. “Too online” for me is absolutely a physical sensation, as it must be for all of us. When my blood starts to feel like Predator blood, I know that I have to get off.

What to Read in 2024

Shelf Life: Julia Alvarez

Cameron Russell Is Unafraid

Percival Everett on 'James'

Lauren Oyler on 'No Judgment' and Criticism

Shelf Life: Téa Obreht

Carissa Broadbent On the Next 'Crowns of Nyaxia'

The Best Mystery and Thriller Books of 2024

Shelf Life: Cathleen Schine

Xochitl Gonzalez on 'Anita de Monte'

Shelf Life: Xochitl Gonzalez

Black Jane Austen Fans Have Never Had It Better

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void’

The ‘poet laureate of Twitter’ and author of the acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy has written her first novel. She discusses politics, finding her voice, and her experience of long Covid

T he day before my interview with the poet, essayist, memoirist and novelist Patricia Lockwood, the attempted coup took place in Washington DC. She, like myself and millions of others, followed it online, scrolling for hours, watching as President Trump continued to incite his fans by posting untruths about the election. Whatever divide ever existed between the real and virtual worlds was as decisively shattered as the Capitol’s windows.

“WHAT A DAY TO BE SITTING ON YOUR BUTT IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, EH,” Lockwood emailed me from her home in Savannah, Georgia, using the all-caps and no-punctuation style that all of us who spend too much time online recognise as meta sarcasm: sarcasm but also sarcastically mocking the obviousness of the sarcasm.

I tell her that I’ve spent 127 hours on Twitter. Lockwood is often described as “the poet laureate of Twitter” and the 38-year-old originally made a name for herself with her joyfully weird tweets, such as her parodies of sexts (“ I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. ‘Wow,’ I yell in ecstasy, ‘This makes no sense at all.’” And asking the Paris Review: “So is Paris any good or not” (no punctuation, of course.) So I feel no shame in admitting my social media addiction to her.

“It was like every hour became somehow cubic and we were chained up in it like a murder basement,” she writes back, combining the punchy hyperbole of Twitter (“murder basement”) with the lyrical originality (“every hour became somehow cubic”) that has made her a literary star. As well as two poetry collections ( Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals ), she has published a bestselling memoir, 2017’s Priestdaddy , about when she and her husband were forced to move back in with her mother and her raucously eccentric father, who became a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times. She is also a contributing editor for the London Review of Books where she wrote about her recent experience with long-term Covid, which she caught when travelling to Harvard last year to give a lecture. She had a bad bout of it: “Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, ‘OK, body, you had a good run, we’re over now.’ But so many people died who didn’t have to,” she says. Whereas she used to travel often, she has been largely housebound for the past year, partly due to the lockdown, but mainly becasue of her health. She still can’t type due to the arthritis she developed: “See how the joints are crazy prominent?” she says, holding up her palms, joints pressing through the flesh. So she largely dictates her notes: “But I have to consider myself lucky, even though I can’t use my hands.”

When Lockwood was a young unknown, her poems occasionally getting plucked from the slush piles of literary magazines, posting online taught her how to let her personality shine through in her writing. She has always had an almost synaesthetic reaction to words: “When I read the words ‘moonlit swim’ I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word ‘sunshine’ had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it,” she writes in Priestdaddy , something she puts down to being, she says, “not a neurotypical person”. Whether she’s writing a poem about Shirley Temple (“Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do / you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand / in a circle and whisper to her, ‘Shirley Temple / there will be war. Shirley Temple you’ll get no / lunch’”) or describing the decor of a restaurant in Priestdaddy (“a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint”), there is the impression that Lockwood is getting as much of a kick out of her gleefully unique prose as the reader.

“Absolutely – I’m the Barbra Streisand of tasting my own voice. I don’t have any problems with procrastination where writing is concerned,” she says. Writing on the internet helped her to find that pleasure in her originality. But in around 2012, she noticed there was increasingly a conformity in online writing: the hyperbole, the all-caps, the meta sarcasm, the coining of a universal internet-speak. Her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, published in the UK next month, has already garnered praise from Sally Rooney and was extracted in the New Yorker last year (“Now everyone is talking about this,” an American writer emailed me, deliberately invoking the excitement around the extract, and also, less deliberately, his jealousy of the size of the literary spotlight accorded to Lockwood.) The novel began as a diary in which she wrote about being on the internet and “the feeling my thoughts were being dictated”.

“You have to look for where the language goes crunchy, where everybody starts saying the same things and formulating their reactions in the same way – and step out of it,” Lockwood says. The result of this stepping out is an extraordinarily original novel about interplay between the online and real worlds, one which would have felt bitingly relevant anyway, but now feels almost painfully so. On the day of our interview – which we, inevitably, conduct online – the newspaper headlines are that Trump will be banned from Twitter. In Lockwood’s book he is referred to ironically-but-also-not-ironically as “the dictator”.

“We could all see [how Trump used Twitter] and that lets people take a book about Twitter more seriously. But good luck describing the book!” she laughs.

Here goes. The first half is about the unnamed and extremely online (“Extremely Online”, as extremely online people put it) protagonist’s life on social media, where she communicates in memes (“SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS”), talks in “the new shared sense of humour” (ironic, doomy, deliberately exclusive) and makes herself care about the things that they care about (“Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police”). She watches how people’s behaviour changes online, individually and collectively (“A man who three years ago only ever posted things like ‘I’m a retard with butt aids’ was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way”). She also explains the reason for those changes in passages that evoke proper laughter as opposed to merely an emoji laughing face:

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes, were suddenly feeling compelled to speak about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

The book is formatted into bite-sized paragraphs, so it feels as if you are scrolling down a social media timeline. It is also largely autobiographical and in the second half a devastating family tragedy occurs, and the protagonist mentally returns to the offline world. Whereas in the first half of the book the narrator’s biological sex is irrelevant, in the second half – the offline part – it is inescapable as she is forced to confront issues such as abortion rights, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. On the internet people send her memes, in the real world they ask her why she hasn’t had a baby yet.

“I’ve always felt like a grey alien who’s forced to wear a bikini in summer, and I don’t know if I’m capable of having children, which disqualifies me from traditional womanhood to a lot of people. I think that is what is so attractive about the internet to me and people like me: you can exist there as a spirit in the void,” Lockwood says.

Lockwood is all too aware that books about the internet have a bad reputation: “[They] had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement,” she writes in Nobody Is Talking About This . There is no boner pressure here. The novel captures better than anything I’ve ever read what it’s like to be online, which is not a surprise, given how enmeshed Lockwood’s life is with the internet: as well as originally coming to prominence on Twitter, she met her husband Jason Kendall online (in a poetry chatroom – “so innocent”). Lockwood had no doubt that she could pull off this high-wire act of a book: “I have never experienced a lack of confidence, because I’m an extreme megalomaniac,” she says, ironically-but-not-ironically. “I think this is something I inherited from my dad. This is a guy who believes he has the vocation to be a Catholic priest, so maybe if you grow up seeing something like that you get weird ideas about what you’re set on Earth to do.”

As deeply enjoyable as Nobody Is Talking About This is, as I read it I wondered if this ephemeral thing – Twitter – was a worthy subject for Lockwood’s enduring talent. “So many people are spending all their time on it, and it’s a worthwhile topic just for that reason,” she says. Even politicians communicate in internet-speak now: Hillary Clinton tweeted the meme “Delete your account” at Trump and Barack Obama teases Joe Biden with visual memes . It is wallpapering the brains of those of us who use it too much, as much as it’s warping our politics, so Lockwood is right: it is absurd to treat Twitter as irrelevant. But was she worried that those who aren’t Extremely Online would be put off by the book’s Extreme Online-ness?

“I never thought about the non-Extremely Online reactions,” she says. “But yes, you want [the book] to stand up to the test of time, but also to preserve the vernacular, so that’s the line you’re walking.”

The internet can be a place where you hide yourself behind memes, or post your most intimate thoughts. Lockwood has generally taken the former approach, revealing little of her life online. But in her publishing career, she has gone the other way. In 2012 the website, the Awl, published her poem, “Rape Joke” , which was far sparser than her previous poems. It was also, unusually, autobiographical, describing when she was raped when she was 19.

“My work up to that point was so non-autobiographical, I was like a little Wallace Stevens : ‘Look at this jar, it’s on a hill! I’m barely here!’ So maybe if you keep the autobiographical dammed up for so long, it emerges in something like ‘Rape Joke’,” she says.

After years of just scraping by, “Rape Joke” propelled her to literary celebrity, aided by Lockwood’s original support system, the internet, where the poem went viral, as poems rarely do. After that she published Priestdaddy , in which she described her peripatetic childhood in the midwest with her “charismatic but also batshit crazy a lot” conservative parents, her attempted suicide as a teenager and her adult writing career. She writes about her parents very fondly, but says if she was still living with them “I’d be back on the mental ward, because of [their] politics”. Her father was, she says, “an early inhabitant of the rightwing alternate reality” and is a fan of conservative figureheads such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (but not Fox News: “Too liberal.”)

“One of the first experiences I had of someone whose language was going crunchy was when I’d hear him say something and think: ‘That’s not something he came up with himself, he’s repeating something that someone else told him.’ That struck me as strange,” she says.

On the one hand, Lockwood’s rise to fame looks like an eminently 21 st century story: she made her name on Twitter and she has now written two books that at least touch on the online world. But she also took a more traditional path, achieving literary acclaim by writing about her most personal experiences, something women writers – from Nora Ephron to Elizabeth Wurtzel – have done for decades.

“ Priestdaddy came out at the height of the cult of the personal essay, when [publishers] were encouraging young women to write these books of hyper-revealing essay and not protecting them . With Priestdaddy , I recognised all that to be true and also I knew I could write a good book and that’s what I had to concentrate on,” she says.

Did she feel protected after “Rape Joke” came out? “I don’t think you can be protected, and I did feel vulnerable. Still now I’ll be caught off guard if I’m being introduced somewhere for a reading and the very first thing they say about me is that I wrote “Rape Joke”, and I’m supposed to get up there and make a funny joke. I’ll sometimes go completely quiet and you can see I’m experiencing something traumatic in real time. But it’s still a poem that I wrote,” she says.

Lockwood is currently working on a collection of short stories. I ask if she had always wanted to write stories and she says she doesn’t plan her books that way: “When I’m working on something, I like to use extremely wet clay rather than chipping from a block of marble. So I start a book by nudging my way into dark corners,” she says, taking palpable pleasure from each of the words, possibly picturing a woodland animal, or herself, burrowing through the mud. “Eventually, a path reveals itself,” she smiles.

Read an extract from No One Is Talking About This

What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation she always felt on such occasions – perhaps this would finally be it, the one they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:

chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what

A fter you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didn’t, you would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met. Oh but like that was somehow less worthy than spending your time carefully monitoring the thickness of beaver houses for signs of the severity of the coming winter?

Was she stimming ? She feared very much that she was.

Things that were always there:

Her body, and the barest riffling at the roots of her hair. An almost music in the air, unarranged and primary and swirling, like yarns laid out in their colors waiting. The theme song of a childhood show where mannequins came to life at night in a department store. Anonymous History Channel footage of gray millions on the march, shark-snouted airplanes, silk deployments of missiles, mushroom clouds. An episode of True Life about a girl who liked to oil herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually. The almost-formed unthought, Is there a bug on me???

A great shame about all of it, all of it.

Most viewed

Advertisement

Supported by

Patricia Lockwood’s First Novel Reaches for the Sublime, Online and Off

• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Merve Emre

• Published Feb. 16, 2021 Updated Nov. 30, 2021

[ This is one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021. See the full list . ]

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS By Patricia Lockwood

“The only solution to the internet was to write bad novels with central personages who do not appear.

“The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in its obsessions with junk media.

“The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content.”

Jarett Kobek wrote these self-ironizing words in his 2016 novel “ I Hate the Internet ”; now they could serve as a rubric for critics asked to review novels about the internet and to determine whether these novels are solemnly, unrepentantly bad or good in spite of themselves. “I Hate the Internet” falls into the latter category, as do Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts” (2004), Tao Lin’s “ Taipei ” (2013) and Lynne Tillman’s “ Men and Apparitions ” (2018). The lasting achievement of these strange, excellent novels is to represent not only the relentlessness with which the internet intrudes on our perceptions, our consciousness, but also the larger and more distant forces that allow it to do so. Such novels speak of trolls and mobs, of identity and authenticity, in the same breath with which they whisper about the overproduction of personal “data,” “the information of existence” (Lin), or how corporations command “the thrill of the new” to create demand for their products (Tillman). They find ways, as the critic Mark McGurl puts it, “ to speak back to and against ” their own conditions of existence.

The most recent contender in this genre is Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This.” The author of two poetry collections and a memoir, “ Priestdaddy ,” Lockwood is a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid by turns. Her prose rambles from animal gags to dirty talk to infinitely beautiful meditations on the nature of perception that deflate and turn absurd before they can turn philosophical. She has honed her craft on the internet, mainly on Twitter. That platform, as a mistrustful reviewer once complained, “ rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark ,” inspiring poems like “ Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find ,” or “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.”

[ Read our profile of Lockwood . ]

“No One Is Talking About This” is, in part, a rebuttal to this vision of the internet as enabling a mean and cramped sort of art. The chief virtue of the novel is how it transforms all that is ugly and cheap about online culture — the obsession with junk media; the fragmentary and jerked presentation of content; the mockery, the snark; the postures, the polemics — into an experience of sublimity. Lockwood grasps one of the most extraordinary tricks of the internet, which is its capacity to metamorphose billions of short, often brutish and haphazard utterances into something that feels immensely and solidly real; a single entity, “the internet”; a presence that overwhelms us with both wonder and despair. How big is the internet, exactly? Can we ever know all of it? This feeling of obscurity used to be the domain of nature; what Wordsworth once described as “a portal in the sky.” Lockwood gives us, more simply, “the portal.”

What is the portal? “A brain, a language, a place, a time?” Lockwood’s unnamed narrator asks in what amounts to an extension of Lockwood’s essay “ The Communal Mind ,” published in The London Review of Books in 2019. She is a restless narrator, who thinks in beautiful, witty, tidy paragraphs. She shifts between pronouns and points of view the way one might cycle between tabs late at night, half bored, half elated. There is the all-encompassing “we,” magicking itself into existence whenever everyone online seems to agree on something. There is the “you,” a direct message to the reader, at times solicitous, at times accusatory. There is the more distracted “she,” who ignores us as she posts, clicks and scrolls to the point of hallucination, disavowing the idea that modern novels, like this one, should accommodate old-fashioned analog devices like plot or character.

“Why were we all writing like this now?” the narrator wonders. “Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”

The question many people have demanded that the great internet novel answer is: What does it feel like to be online? For Lockwood, the question of how it feels for one person to be online is indistinguishable from how the internet would narrate its own virtual existence — how it would speak, if it could speak, in a single voice, of the intense, exhausting accretion of matter that makes it feel alive, electric with rage and desperation, greedy for attention and praise, and, as the narrator’s husband says, “like a ventriloquist’s dummy,” “just totally, totally dead.”

“This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?” the narrator wonders. She emerges as a portal for the portal’s uncanny consciousness, churning individual thoughts into tweets, tweets into memes, memes back into the language of thought, until what belongs to me and what belongs to you can no longer be discerned amid this mute, incessant chatter. “What about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but also acts upon you?” the narrator asks. Perhaps worried about being misunderstood or read the wrong way — a persistent fear online, where intent is impossible to fix — the narrator has an anxious habit of providing her reader with running commentary, a user’s guide to the novel.

[ “No One Is Talking About This” was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list . ]

The challenge the novel sets for itself is how to wrench the narrator from the portal and into a singular reality. Her release comes in the novel’s second section, which begins when the narrator learns that her sister is carrying a child with Proteus syndrome, a condition that causes an overgrowth of skin and bone — a child who will likely die soon after she is born.

The narrator knows that the internet is no place for bereavement; here, there are only drive-by mourners, rubberneckers gawking at the pain of others. Both for the sake of plot, what little plot can be salvaged, and for the sake of self-preservation, she must withdraw. Though for one so closely identified with the portal’s consciousness, such withdrawal can only be partial. The fragments remain but are repurposed for the inchoate work of loving then losing. Humor is attempted, but falls terribly flat, dragged down by sentiment. Grief is always a slog.

Yet from this grief emerges grace, a sublimity that is not universal but achingly particular. The baby grows toward death, with “a kind of absolutism that was almost joy,” inhabiting a body and a consciousness that is wholly her own. “She only knows what it is to be herself,” the doctors keep repeating. The baby is not a metaphor, the narrator warns us, yet her wild, untrammeled, inscrutable being is everywhere counterpoised by the internet’s similarly enigmatic existence. When she dies, her doctors harvest her brain. “As long as people were looking at that mind, it was still active in the world, asking and answering, finding out about things, making small dear cries of discovery,” the narrator thinks.

Here is the novel’s secondary virtue: its insistence that the shadow forms of living and thinking — the life led online amid the buzz of the hive mind; the life that persists after death — are, for all their vaporous mystery, no less real than the life led by you or me. And so, the question the narrator first asked of the portal comes back at the end to strike a consolatory note after death: “This did not feel like real life exactly, but nowadays what did.”

Something Kobek did not anticipate in his rubric for how to solve the problem of the internet was that people might stop writing novels altogether. They might write experimental essays or memoirs; champion shagginess and shapelessness; pronounce, as Lockwood did in a recent interview, that the internet has anointed “ the fragmentary and the autofictional … the modes of the times .” Whether or not this is true, one test of the novel in the age of the internet is if it offers enough resistance, on the level of plot or character, structure or tone, to the very media forms it wants to represent. A good novel would not speak in the voice of the internet; it would speak over it, and the clamor it made would allow its critics to hazard a stronger claim for the value of the novel to our virtual lives. For all the local beauty and humor of “No One Is Talking About This,” it does not feel like a good novel, exactly, because it does not feel like a novel at all. But nowadays what does?

Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford.

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS By Patricia Lockwood 210 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

City Arts & Lectures

Patricia Lockwood

This event appeared in the series Fiction/Friction: A Miniseries

We've made a recording of this event free to all. Please support our institution and these productions by making a tax-deductible contribution .

“I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and [No One is Talking About This]  is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet.” – Sally Rooney

Patricia Lockwood is a poet and the author of the memoir Priestdaddy,  an extraordinarily funny account of growing up the daughter of the most singular Catholic priest in America. Lockwood is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books , and has written on Nabokov, John Updike, Lucia Berlin, Joan Didion, the Internet, and more, suffusing her book reviews with her characteristic wit and analytic breadth. She also has a vast following on Twitter, which regularly features her Internet-famous cat, Miette. Lockwood is the author of the two poetry collections  Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals . Her forthcoming first novel,  No One is Talking About This , reckons with the feeling of being eternally online, unable to shut off the feed that keeps on scrolling, no matter what we do to stop it.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Motherhood,  How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor , and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times;  a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her play, All Our Happy Days are Stupid,  had sold-out runs in New York and Toronto, and she is currently developing a new play called The Dug Out.  Her new novel, Pure Colour, will be published in January 2022.

Photo Credit: Grep Hoax

Never miss a show

Sign up for our email newsletter to hear when new shows are added + other announcements

No One Is Talking About This: caught in the net

Book review: patricia lockwood’s humour feels adolescent in novel about internet fame.

Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, as she has tweeted, is ‘about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it’.

Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, as she has tweeted, is “about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it”. It follows the author’s poetry collections, including Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), and a memoir, Priestdaddy, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by the New York Times.

No One Is Talking About This cleaves into two distinct parts. In the first, the unnamed protagonist – propelled to internet fame after tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” – meets fans on an international speaking tour. Two text messages from her mother cut the trip short: “Something has gone wrong” and “How soon can you get here?” She returns to her family home in Ohio to be with her sister, whose baby has been diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, a rare congenital disorder in utero. “Look how big her head is lol,” her sister had texted about an ultrasound before they realised it was a sign of abnormality.

Lockwood’s life is inextricably intertwined with the internet. Having grown up in “all the worst cities of the midwest”, in her memoir she describes it as a refuge: “A place of living, moving, breathing text, a book that continually wrote itself.” She has built a devoted fanbase on Twitter for tweets such as “@parisreview So is Paris any good or not” and posts ventriloquising her cat.

Lockwood’s powerful poem, Rape Joke, which first appeared in 2013 on website The Awl, was widely shared online. Her voice – whether in Twitter “sexts” or erudite yet outrageous contributions to the London Review of Books – was forged in the kiln of Web 2.0: intimate, zany, blasphemous, lewd and unabashedly performative. “I’m a show-off,” she told the Guardian in 2017, “a clown.” In an interview with Sally Rooney at Poetry Ireland in early 2019, Lockwood said that the internet is “the place where I don’t have a body and so I’m not frightened of anything”.

Part two of No One Is Talking About This explores what happens when corporeal realities come to the fore. Although carrying the pregnancy to term poses a health risk to the mother, “none of the doctors, nurses or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion,” writes Lockwood. “Dread rose in their hearts upon hearing the worst seven words in the English language. There was a new law in Ohio.” The law made inducing labour before 37 weeks a felony. “Surely they hadn’t been transported back to 1950s Ireland?” she balks.

The erosion of reproductive rights in the US cuts even closer to the bone now that Donald Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court puts Roe v Wade – a landmark case in which the court ruled that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional – at stake. “We already live in the country that we fear,” Lockwood told the New Yorker.

A portion of the novel’s first section was delivered as a lecture, The Communal Mind, at the British Museum and printed in the London Review of Books in early 2019. The book lacks the visual aid of the slideshow accompanying the lecture and incorporated online in the London Review. The jokes struggle to land on their own and, alas, already feel dated.

It is no easy feat to recreate life online. Still, authors who have done so with more metaphorical language, including Elif Batuman in The Idiot (2017) and Olivia Sudjic in Sympathy (2017), stand up better to rereading than Lockwood’s collage of internet ephemera.

By design, the first half of No One Is Talking About This recreates the sensation of too much time scrolling – bringing to mind Eric Carle’s children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in which the fuzzy protagonist binges on a series of foodstuffs only to find himself craving a nice green leaf, leaving one feeling overstimulated and empty.

So, does the change of tack in the second half offer more sustenance? The baby’s caretaking is meant to be in sharp contrast to what Lockwood calls “the portal”, although the story continues to be told in fragments. While the experience with her niece makes her wonder if she’s wasting her life, it does not re-wallpaper the protagonist’s brain. “I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore,” she admits.

We know from the acknowledgments that part two is also based on Lockwood’s life, but the off-colour jokes that persist as a coping mechanism keep pathos at arm’s length. She accomplished tragicomedy masterfully in Rape Joke – daring us to laugh at something profoundly unfunny.

Here the humour feels not brave but adolescent: on seeing her mother after receiving the devastating news, the protagonist’s first thought is that the last maternal text contained the spurting three droplets emoji, “which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz”. While the baby’s world is rendered in detail, the characters of the baby’s parents and the shape of their grief remain impressionistic.

In a double autofictional wink at the end of the novel, the protagonist is invited to give a talk at the British Museum, where she reads about giving a talk at the British Museum. Her body is behind the podium but her mind flashes back to the neonatal intensive care unit, ostensibly to signal that the experience has changed her. In the real-life video of Lockwood’s lecture, she grips both an iPad and her smartphone.

“God has given us the internet as a hamster wheel,” she recently tweeted. “Strap in and ride, b**ch.” You’ll forgive me if I’d rather stay on the ground.

“We sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again. But it won’t. The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it,” writes Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror (2019). “In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes.”

Mia Levitin

Mia Levitin, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a cultural and literary critic

IN THIS SECTION

Headshot is a coming-of-age story, a portrait of girlhood seen through competitive contact sport, wild atlantic writers: the vibrant aesthetic of the whole wild world bus was ‘shaped with the input of children’, international booker prize shortlist: europe and south america dominate, broken archangel: the tempestuous lives of roger casement review, best new children’s fiction, from a fairy disguised as a rabbit to a boy who turns into a dinosaur, ‘dublin jimmy’ was friendly with and worked for sean quinn, brother tells court, home of the year winner revealed: restored 1920s redbrick ‘full of style and bold design’ lands the big prize, ‘my wife wants another child, but i would be in my 80s when they go to college’, ‘when my grandad arrived he was illiterate, and now his grandson is earning this country an oscar nomination’, simon harris’s new cabinet formally appointed by president at áras an uachtaráin, latest stories, biden says netanyahu’s approach to war in gaza is a ‘mistake’, john laing group eyes dublin metro plan, your top stories on wednesday; irish universities face deficits of €15m; the climate case with big implications for ireland, boeing crisis of confidence deepens with 787 now under scrutiny, thousands of children unsure of gender identity ‘let down by nhs’, report finds.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards

Patricia Lockwood

2024 writer-in-residence.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel “No One Is Talking About This,” an international bestseller, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, finalist for the Booker Prize, and translated into 30 languages. Her 2017 memoir “Priestdaddy” won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century. She also has two poetry collections, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” (2014) and “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” (2012). Lockwood’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.

The American Library in Paris Writer-in-Residence program was created in 2018 to foster cultural and artistic exchange between prominent writers and the Library community.

The Residency is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.

Friends of the Library (50€ – 249€) will receive invitations to unique, donor-only programs.

Folio Society (250€ – 1 999€) supporters will be invited to the annual Book Award ceremony, as well as donor-only programs.

Gutenberg Society (2 000€ – 9 999€) patrons will have the opportunity to host a dinner with an Evenings with an Author sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg speaker, as well as all the benefits listed above.

Ex Libris Lux Society (10 000€ and above) sponsors will be invited to an annual dinner with Ex Libris Lux donors and Library leadership, as well as all the benefits listed above. They will also be invited to an exclusive cocktail dînatoire with our Gala speaker.

A charitable gift from your estate is simple to implement and is easy to change if you should need to access the assets during your lifetime. If you would like to include a gift to the Library in your will, ask your estate planning attorney to add this suggested wording to your will or living trust. Please make sure to use the Library’s correct legal name appears in all final documents as: The American Library in Paris Inc.

Unrestricted Gift : I give, devise, and bequeath to the American Library in Paris Inc, (insert dollar amount) Dollars* to be used for its general purposes.

Residuary Bequest : I give, devise, and bequeath to the American Library in Paris Inc , (insert percentage amount) percent of the residue of my estate to be used for its general purposes.

• Podcasts & Videos
• Newsletters

London Review of Books

More search Options

• Advanced search
• Search by contributor
• Browse our cover archive

Browse by Subject

• Arts & Culture
• Biography & Memoir
• History & Classics
• Literature & Criticism
• Philosophy & Law
• Politics & Economics
• Psychology & Anthropology
• Science & Technology
• Latest Issue
• Contributors
• About the LRB
• Close Readings

Putting on Kafka’s Tux

Patricia lockwood.

Please sign in to read the full article.

K afka ​ had consumption, which everyone else also had at that time: look at them up on the tops of mountains, men coughing spots in love with women coughing spots, so that you could draw lines between them until the whole world was filled in. It was a comfort to read him in a year when everyone again had the same disease. More specifically her, for in that moment she was everyone. She thought she could work through him, if she could not work through herself; she thought she could use his hands, if she could not use her own. She drew three exclamation marks next to the sentence: ‘I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body.’

‘So you are Dr Kafka,’ said the doctor who cured people with colours. But Kafka, before the doctor could write ‘blue’ on his pad, set down his hat in a ridiculous place and flew straight into a prepared speech:

My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) which in my opinion correspond very closely to the clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor, in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

She had a friend who reserved the greatest hatred for Max Brod – he should never have published his papers, the world should have been a closed eye against Kafka, after all he was his friend . No, she couldn’t quite get there. She preferred a world that was stark and staring, that looked unforgivably into the drawer. She and Kafka were practically twins. Like her, he suffered badly from Who Foot Is That, like her he was dying from I Am What I’m Looking At syndrome, yet he was able to go to cabarets – every night it sometimes seemed – and observe the red knees of the girls.

‘So good. A major classic,’ she had told a friend in high school of The Castle , which she hadn’t read. At that point she strongly felt she had read books she had only heard of, for imagine her getting this far in the first place! Plus she just loved castles, they were so good, a major classic. So her friend read it, and on the day that their book reports were due looked at her sideways, and she responded with a sideways look that said: ‘Some people just aren’t ready for it.’ After that they were less good friends, like Kafka and Max Brod after he published his papers.

Why was Kafka possible to read, when everything else looked like the alphabet ejaculated at random on the ground? Kafka ejaculated the alphabet in order. Every so often an article came out in the New Yorker about how he masturbated constantly to the craziest porn – she couldn’t remember exactly what, but maybe etchings, and pictures of bloomers, and puppets freaking out on their strings – so that it was a wonder he had any time left to write.

Or: ‘Clothes brushed against me, once I seized a ribbon that ornamented the back of a girl’s skirt and let her draw it out of my hand as I walked away …’ Maybe the porn was like that.

The Kafka Museum was a low-lying building next to a lake surrounded by shrieking swans. The restaurants that they passed on the way, and that they might go to afterwards if Kafka made them hungry, all advertised the same thing: pork knuckle. But at the last minute, perhaps fearing such a hunger, her husband only allowed her to go into the gift shop, not the museum itself. He hated the lives of authors, of which she was one.

Perhaps for the bug reason, she could only ever picture Kafka lying on his back. Perhaps because of his surviving photos, she had the idea that he medically could not blink. Perhaps feeling her scrutiny long in the future, he wrote: ‘The time which has just gone by and in which I haven’t written a word has been so important for me because I have stopped being ashamed of my body in the swimming pools of Prague, Königssaal and Czernoschitz.’

When Kafka tries to buy a tuxedo, everything conspires against him – he must refer to it as ‘the future tuxedo’, eternally receding from him. He wants a tuxedo lined and trimmed with silk, but the tailor has never heard of such a thing. He can only write, in despair: ‘Everything happens to me forever.’ She considered, in a time traveller scenario, taking Kafka with her to Peppe Ramundo, the mobbed-up West Side shop where her husband and brothers rented their tuxedos for her wedding. There was something funny about Peppe Ramundo: one of them only had to say the words ‘ Peppe Ramundo’ and the rest collapsed into laughter. Whatever it was, she knew Kafka would be able to find it at Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black Tie.

The modes, the modes were living creatures and the modes changed – all that stayed the same was that they had four legs and carried our thoughts on their backs. If this were written in the 1990s it would be called ‘Kafka’s Tuxedo’, and in order to illustrate it, we would have resurrected Chagall for a single night so that he could paint Kafka as an empty suit riding a horse over the rooftops of Prague, with a violin between his legs to represent tragedy and two stars for his eyes.

Kafka gave a lecture once, on Yiddish. Beforehand, he experienced ‘a night twisted up in bed, hot and sleepless’, living out his greatest fears one after another: ‘The notices are not published in the papers the way in which they were expected to be, distraction in the office, the stage does not come, not enough tickets are sold, the colour of the tickets upsets me.’

‘Cold and heat alternate in me with the successive words of the sentence, I dream melodic rises and falls, I read sentences of Goethe’s as though my whole body were running down the stresses.’ It was descriptions like these that would later cause us to diagnose Kafka as being schizoid, as having borderline personality disorder, though that was ridiculous, she thought. He had the same thing she had.

When she first started to go mad, she reread ‘The Metamorphosis’ and experienced the pain of the apple core herself, and believed she had an insight about Gregor’s sense of duty: it had nowhere to go, he could have been useful, all the little crawling things of the earth can be useful, even she could be useful, doubled over in pain around her apple core, and for weeks afterwards tried to revise her novel so that it contained the sentence:

give gregor samsa a ball of dung to roll

She read Kafka in a pair of jeans she could not remember buying – it must have been last summer when her body began disappearing. They were Gap, size 4, and she must have gone into the fitting room, the manager must have spelled her name wrong as usual, TRISHA, her heart must have been exploding as it always was then, to think that there were stores in this world full of the fabric , which she had recently begun to feel between her fingertips, the cotton and the canvas of what was, she must have wrestled her way into the jeans she could not remember, which she would wear for – how long? The rest of her life? Surely the tuxedo Kafka was trying to buy was the body, and the lining a permanent caress within it, which the maker had never heard of, which could not be obtained. ‘Trisha,’ the manager must have called, rattling the lock of the door. ‘Are we still doing OK?’

Looking into the face of just such a manager, Kafka had set down the secret of fiction: ‘When I see people of this kind I always think: How did he get into this job, how much does he make, where will he be tomorrow, what awaits him in his old age, where does he live, in what corner does he stretch out his arms before going to sleep, could I do his job, how should I feel about it?’

‘Are you reading that roach again?’ her husband called from the other room, where he had been eating the same apple for an hour, or else Kafka had stretched her perception of time.

Her husband had bought a T-shirt in the gift shop, with a drawing of Kafka’s head on the body of a bug. The sleeves didn’t fit his biceps, so he cut them, and then it shrank in the wash, so he chopped off the midriff. He just kept cutting off bits of it until it appeared that Kafka was strapped to his chest like a baby, and then the two of them would go into the garage and lift weights together. That was his relationship to all literature, and also to all clothing.

To read the diaries of a dead man is to find him aware of everything that is happening to you. ‘It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not,’ he wrote, directly addressing her little black comb. Underscored three times: ‘Nothing can be accomplished with such a body.’ ‘Then for an hour on the sofa thought about jumping-out-of-the-window,’ Kafka wrote, with dashes – like jack-in-the-pulpit, butter-and-eggs, flowers.

Max’s objection to Dostoevsky, that he allows too many mentally ill persons to enter. Completely wrong. They aren’t ill. Their illness is merely a way to characterise them, and moreover a very delicate and fruitful one. One need only stubbornly keep repeating of a person that he is simple-minded and idiotic, and he will, if he has the Dostoevskian core inside him, be spurred on, as it were, to do his very best.

In his bitterest moments, he spoke of his education and how it had betrayed him. ‘I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became.’ She knew exactly how he felt. They had made her do ‘I’m a little teapot’ in kindergarten and it became true for the rest of her life, that was her handle, that was her spout, she could feel the hot tea coursing through her, whenever she moved it spilled, her life was spelled out somewhere at the bottom of her, in leaves.

Kafka made up a sentence: ‘Little friend, pour forth,’ and ‘incessantly sang it to a special tune’.

His uneducated self sometimes appeared to him in dreams the way a dead bride appears to others. He called it good and beautiful. Possibly it looked like her, pale, 21 years old and knowing nothing of the world, peering timidly into the window of Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black Tie.

The statue of St John on the stone bridge was the one that all the tourists touched; there was a superstition that it meant you would return to Prague someday. The part of the statue that was touched had become brighter, not like the dull dark rest of the bridge; it was the hand, the knee, it was the foot, she could not quite put her finger on what it was, it was her memory.

A corner was blowing at the edge of her eye: it was the stack of papers she kept weighed down with the cobblestone she had brought back. She had stubbed her toe on it under the astronomical clock – it was dislodged so completely from the smoothness of the street, it threw such an undeniable dark cube in her path, that there was nothing to do but pick it up and smuggle it home through airport security. Amazing that it could now hardly hold down her papers, where previously it had held down the whole of Prague.

If Kafka lived today he would not have to be a bureaucrat, or whatever the hell it was he was. He could be, instead, one of the men in a panda suit she had seen in the old town square, soliciting international coins from children. The idea of the panda, like the idea of the man, was that it stood totally still while the rest of the world poured around it, that it did not move at all and then suddenly extended a hand.

‘I want to change my place in the world entirely, which actually means that I want to go to another planet; it would be enough if I could exist alongside myself, it would even be enough if I could consider the spot on which I stand as some other spot.’ Or was that the tuxedo he meant, the one the tailor couldn’t even imagine?

They had seen the old cemetery coming up the hill through the twilight, but had veered away from it at the last minute, for if there was a second thing her husband couldn’t stand, it was the deaths of writers. Still, it had seemed from that glimpse to be full of tiny houses, each with a name on the door. You could imagine their shadows still living in them, coming back from the markets with their arms full of the shapes of apples, fish and almonds – just as letters sometimes seemed on the page, cast by something living and larger. ‘I find the letter K offensive, almost disgusting, and yet I use it; it must be very characteristic of me.’

So the best resource is to meet everything as calmly as possible, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, to yield to the non-conscious that you believe far away while it is precisely what is burning you, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that. A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows.

She examined the blurbs on the back of the book. ‘If anyone ever said, of me, that I had “a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham”, I would lose my fucking shit,’ she said. ‘I would go crazy.’

He was coming into the public domain this year; that meant all of him, she thought. Imagine the feeling of release, being dead and belonging to the people. Now someone gets to draw a little cartoon of you, or insert you into their Amish romance; now you’re a character at an off-brand waterpark, trying to cover up your body as you go mournfully down the slides. Next year, they will dress freely in his suit in Prague, will extend a hand in him suddenly, as the rest of the world turns.

‘Did you find in the diaries some final proof against me?’

She had thought of the way she wanted the diaries to end, with a sudden parting gift in the palms of her hands – what was it he had written? ‘The work draws to an end the way an unhealed wound might draw together.’ But it snuck up on her gradually, in bare feet and with pale swinging pendulum, the knowledge that Kafka seems to have spent time in a nudists’ colony. For four hundred pages he had written of people who were clothed and then the ribbons swished, the buttons popped, the shapes all fell to the forest floor. ‘When I see these stark-naked people moving slowly past among the trees (though they are usually at a distance), I now and then get light, superficial attacks of nausea. Their running doesn’t make things any better .’ How could he know what she needed, from the moment she read about his unattainable tuxedo, the silk lining, the tailor who could not yet understand the language he spoke, to the moment that he wrote, ‘It is impossible to clean the kind of clothes we wear today!’

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN [email protected] Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app , available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Please enable Javascript

This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.

Podcasts & Videos

• Newsletters

London Review of Books

More search Options

• Advanced search
• Search by contributor
• Browse our cover archive

Browse by Subject

• Arts & Culture
• Biography & Memoir
• History & Classics
• Literature & Criticism
• Philosophy & Law
• Politics & Economics
• Psychology & Anthropology
• Science & Technology
• Latest Issue
• Contributors
• About the LRB
• Close Readings

Why do we sleep?

W hy ​ do we sleep ? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the...

Across the life sciences in the 19th century, sleep was generally considered to be a vestige of our deep evolutionary past with no present value. Given its obvious disadvantages so far as economic productivity is concerned, there was much speculation that modern medicine would discover a way to reduce the need for it, or even eliminate it altogether. 

Cold War Liberalism

Stephen holmes.

S amuel Moyn ​ didn’t begin his career as a crusading left-wing critic of liberalism. His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at...

Samuel Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar), much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be applied, are a single creature with a single mind. So how did he decide on his ‘composite portrait’, and what does it exclude?

Michael Hofmann

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole.

Mary Wellesley

W hen ​ my daughter began to talk about her body and the bodies of others, I wondered what word we should use for female genitals. I had been taught the term ‘front-bottom’ as a child. Very little needs to be said here about how stupid this is. My husband and I opted instead for ‘vulva’. It’s functional, but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter...

One of the earliest terms for both the vagina and the womb is the Old English word cwitha . I shared this with my best girlfriends. They said it sounded like a lovely village in Wales, filled with men of melodious voice. This seemed apt.

The Belgrano Diary

The sinking of the General Belgrano was the bloodiest and most controversial military action of the Falklands War. This is the story of a diary written onboard the British submarine that fired the torpedoes, the diary that proved Thatcher's government hadn’t told the truth about what happened. Listen to the new six-part podcast series hosted by Andrew O’Hagan.

On Justin Torres

J an Gay ​ was born Helen Reitman in Leipzig in 1902. She came out as a lesbian in young adulthood, studied under the German sexologist Magnus Hirshfield, started a nudist colony with her partner, Zhenya, and eventually collected interviews with hundreds of queer women in European cities, in the hope that writing up their sexual histories would help make lesbianism more accepted. When she...

Justin Torres’s Blackouts isn’t biography, or historical fiction, but a kind of compilation of miscellanea that provides some primary texts, adds fictional embellishments, and then shrugs.

In the latest issue

4 april 2024.

• Mary Wellesley: Gurle Talk
• Mike Jay: Why do we sleep?
• T.J. Clark: ‘Clapham in March’
• Michael Ledger-Lomas: Last Gasp Apparitions
• Michael Hofmann: Halldór Laxness does both
• Brandon Taylor: Two Years with Zola
• Akshi Singh: Good for Tata
• William Davies: Capitalism Decarbonised
• Frances Webber: Short Cuts
• Hazel V. Carby: Remembering the Future
• Stephen Holmes: Cold War Liberalism
• Philip Knox: At the Bodleian
• Emily Witt: On Justin Torres
• Robert Crawford: ‘After the British Library Cyberattack’
• Pooja Bhatia: Diary

Don’t take our word for it

Subscribe to the  LRB  – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

Two Years with Zola

Brandon taylor.

Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it is a moral necessity to do so, at least in the extra-literary dimension that is life. For his characters, things are a bit bleaker. 

For Zola, the greatest moral act is to bear witness. Sometimes when I read novels set in the past, a contemporary smugness sets in. But when the past comes uncomfortably close to the events you’re living through you realise how new so many of our institutions and customs are, and how fragile.

Last Gasp Apparitions

Michael ledger-lomas.

A ndrew Lang ​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ‘real or sham...

It wasn’t a belief in the supernatural that marked someone out as insane, but the judgment of the authorities that this belief was held with harmful vehemence. One inmate who proclaimed himself to be Jesus was actually committed for striking a cab horse with an axe. Doctors wouldn’t call you mad if you saw the ghost of a loved one, but they might if, over time, the ghost kept saying the wrong thing or refused to disappear.

Remembering the Future

Hazel v. carby.

A band ​ of light, reflected across the waters of Morgan Lake, New Mexico, leads our eyes from the centre foreground to a power plant on the Navajo Reservation: the Four Corners Power Plant, one of the largest coal-fired generating stations in the United States. In this photograph by the Diné artist Will Wilson, the plant is entirely in shadow, as dark as the bituminous coal that fuels...

I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most often on those maps was red, not white, a difference in surface but not in substance: that red and the white on this map signal the same thing – a celebration of power and domination.

Halldór Laxness does both

I f geography ​ isn’t destiny, it comes close. Consider Iceland, at the apex of the North Atlantic. From there, one leg of a pair of dividers drops south to the Scandinavian ports and Scotland, and then to the rest of what one thinks of as Europe. The other leg gives prime access, through a little-used window in the Hudson Bay, to Canada and the United States. That’s it,...

Like the inhabitants of other small and remote countries, the Icelander has the choice to go or stay. Halldór Laxness did both. He was a cosmopolitan and a homebody. He yo-yoed. He stayed in Iceland and he left.

Capitalism Decarbonised

William davies.

T he ​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by...

When it’s capitalism that’s the problem, and not markets, the only alternative is post-capitalism. But the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the political challenge increases with each passing day.

Leaving Haiti

Pooja bhatia.

O n ​ 2 March , armed men broke into two prisons in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and released almost five thousand inmates. The ratatatat of automatic gunfire sounded continuously throughout the city as the gangs torched buildings and had firefights with police. The US embassy, which since 2018 has warned Americans not to travel to Haiti, sent an email strongly advising its citizens to...

In 2015, for the first time, large numbers of Haitians made the seven-thousand-mile journey through South and Central America, and then north through Mexico to the US border. Some sought asylum. But most were simply ‘chèche lavi’ – looking for life.

Good for Tata

Akshi singh.

A crumpled ​ hundred-rupee banknote falls from a man’s pocket. The camera shows Gandhi’s face on the note. A young girl picks the money up, and asks her mother what she should do with it. Her mother says she can get herself chocolate, buy a doll or give it back. The girl hands the note back to the man who dropped it. Against a background of sentimental music, a voice announces:...

The slippage between Tata and India speaks not just to Tata’s central place in the development of Indian capitalism but also to the way in which the corporation has variously come to represent progress, the evils of capitalism, and even the state itself.

‘Chaucer Here and Now’

Philip knox.

O ne ​ of the frustrating things about Chaucer is that the literary archive only begins at the time of his death in 1400. No earlier manuscripts containing his writings survive. This means that we don’t know how his works circulated in his lifetime, what he wanted them to look like, which of the competing versions he preferred, or even, in any detail, who his first readers were. There...

In the shifting, centuries-long history of his reception, Chaucer has been read as both irreverent and pious, experimental and traditional, cosmopolitan and quintessentially English.

For ever Falkland?

Tam dalyell.

‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ I suggest that this is an appropriate motto, not of course for the unfortunate men of the Task Force, but for those who sent them to the South Atlantic. It characterises the whole operation – an operation, as I have tried to show in this journal, which was conceived in an emotional spasm, by the injured pride of the House of Commons, on that hysterical Saturday morning, 3 April 1982. A task force had to be assembled, because it had to be assembled, to do something about the dreadful Argentine Junta, who had taken advantage of our negligence in withdrawing the survey vessel, HMS Endurance , with her peashooter of a gun. No blow-mouth, that Saturday morning, had the remotest idea of what he, or more particularly she – and there was not only Mrs Thatcher, by a long chalk, in this latter category – wanted to do, once the task force had arrived, and, by appearing on the horizon, had automatically shunted the dago intruders out of our island. No one had the haziest notion of what their rational, long-term objective should be. When I interrupted Mrs Thatcher’s opening speech to inquire who our friends were in South America on this issue, she could not name one, even then. But MPs collectively were in no mood to care.

‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ I suggest that this is an appropriate motto, not of course for the unfortunate men of the Task Force, but for those who sent them to the South Atlantic. It characterises the whole operation – an operation, as I have tried to show in this journal, which was conceived in an emotional spasm, by the injured pride of the House of Commons, on that hysterical Saturday morning, 3 April 1982.

From the blog

On the quito embassy raid.

When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were  . . .

Front Page News

Des freedman.

The Israeli army’s targeted hit on an aid convoy in Gaza that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers featured on the front page of every  . . .

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart;  . . .

At the Teatro Amazonas

Harriet rix.

Between 1880 and 1900, the opera house in Manaus sprouted like a magical pink mushroom out of the rainforest  . . .

Tamar Pelleg-Sryck 1926-2024

I first met the Israeli lawyer Tamar Pelleg-Sryck in Megiddo Military Prison, where I was sent after receiving an administrative detention order  . . .

On the Crocus City Hall Attack

Mass murder at a Moscow light entertainment venue, where 140 people were gunned down at point blank range as they gathered to watch the nostalgic  . . .

Who read it?

Paul taylor.

Altmetric is a website that tracks mentions of academic research on social media. Last week, a paper published in Radiology Case Reports leaped  . . .

Devil Terms

Arianne shahvisi.

Even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer  . . .

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj mishra.

A powerful Western narrative holds the Shoah to be the incomparable crime of the modern era. But we find our moral and political consciousness profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide. What is the fate of universal values after Israel’s collapse into violent nationalism?

Pankaj Mishra delivered his...

In his LRB Winter Lecture, Pankaj Mishra considers the ways in which our moral and political consciousness is profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide.

Mary Wellesley and Thomas Jones

Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent review of Jenni Nuttall’s  Mother Tongue , Mary Wellesley connects our linguistic squeamishness to changing ideas about women and sexuality. She joins Tom to discuss the changing language of women’s anatomy, work and lives.

Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent review of Jenni Nuttall’s  Mother...

On Satire: The Earl of Rochester

Clare bucknell and colin burrow.

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to...

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of...

Repopulating Architecture

Rosemary hill and thomas jones.

Rosemary Hill, reviewing Steven Brindle’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830 , celebrates his approach to architecture as a social, collaborative endeavour, where human need (and human greed) stymies starchitectural vision. Rosemary takes Tom on a tour of British and Irish architecture, from the Reformation through industrialisation, featuring big egos, unexpected...

Rosemary Hill, reviewing Steven Brindle’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830 , celebrates his approach to architecture as a social, collaborative endeavour, where human need...

Political Poems: 'Easter 1916' by W.B. Yeats

Seamus perry and mark ford.

Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and...

Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas...

The Lost Art of Paste-Up

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting required a sharp scalpel, a parallel-motion board and plenty of glue.

As the  London Review of Books  celebrates its 40th anniversary, we look back at what paste-up used to involve in the...

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting...

Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...

Collections

Lrb winter lectures 2010-2023.

Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...

Missing Pieces I: The je ne sais quoi

Writing about mystery, the unintelligible and that for which no words can be found by Jenny Diski, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, John Lanchester, Alice Spawls and Hal Foster.

Missing Pieces II: What was left out

Writing about obsolete objects, missing words and anonymous writers by Andrew O’Hagan, Amia Srinivasan, Irina Dumitrescu, Lucia Berlin, Lawrence Rainey and Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Missing Pieces III: Alchemical Pursuits

Writing about cognitive gaps, stolen artworks and missing the things you never had by Hilary Mantel, Michael Neve, Rosa Lyster, Clancy Martin, James Davidson and Malcolm Gaskill.

LRB Diary for 2024: 52 ways of thinking about Kafka

Analysis gone wrong.

Unorthodox psychoanalytic encounters in the LRB archive by Wynne Godley, Sherry Turkle, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Nicholas Spice, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jenny Diski, Brigid Brophy, Adam Phillips, D.J. Enright...

Living by the Clock

Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...

Gossip and Notes on Work and Reading

For the first time since 1982, there is no annual Diary by Alan Bennett. He says his life is so dull he won’t inflict it on LRB readers. If it suddenly gets more interesting he promises he’ll let us...

Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd. 

War on God! That is Progress!

Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.

Suffering Souls

Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.

Ministry of Apparitions

Writing about superstition by Matthew Sweeney, Hilary Mantel, Malcolm Gaskill, Patricia Lockwood, Theodore Zeldin, Katherine Rundell, Peter Campbell, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Angela Carter, Ian Penman...

The day starts now

Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski. 

Summer lunchtime reading from the LRB archive by James Meek, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bee Wilson, Colm Tóibín and Rosa Lyster. 

Oh What A Night

Summer evening reading from the LRB archive by Anne Carson, Rosemary Hill, John Gallagher, Zoë Heller, Anne Diebel and Patricia Lockwood.

World Weather

From June 2022 to June 2023, the LRB has been collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland,...

Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden. 

In the Classroom

Writing about teaching and learning by William Davies, Ian Jack, Jenny Turner, Thomas Jones, Lorna Finlayson, Paul Foot, Wang Xiuying, Marina Warner and Stefan Collini.  

Plainclothes in our Living Rooms

Writing about the police by Barbara Wootton, Daniel Trilling, Alice Spawls, Adam Reiss, Ronan Bennett, Thomas Jones, Paul Foot, Katrina Forrester, Melanie McFadyean, Matt Foot and Christopher Tayler.

Little Monstrosities

Writing about dog/human bonds by Hannah Rose Woods, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Iain Sinclair, Michael Burns, Anne Carson, Alison Light, Frank Cioffi, Amia Srinivasan and Jenny Turner.

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s Adam Shatz with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thought of the 20th century, Thomas Jones and Emily Wilson on truth and lies in Greek and Roman literature and Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell on satire. Listen to all three series for just £4.99 a month or £49.99 for the year.

LRB Screen x Mubi: 'Quartet'

The second of this year's six LRB screenings at the Garden Cinema, in partnership with MUBI, is James Ivory’s vivid and rarely screened adaptation of Jean Rhys’s 1928 novel. Rhys's biographer Miranda Seymour will introduce and discuss the film with Gareth Evans.

Love’s Work: James Butler, Rebekah Howes & Rowan Williams

Siblings: jay bernard, mary jean chan, will harris & nisha ramayya, sinéad gleeson & douglas stuart: hagstone.

In the next issue , which will be dated 25 April, Terry Eagleton on where culture comes from, Sophie Smith on women philosophers and Alexander Clapp reports from Montenegro.

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app , available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Please enable Javascript

This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.