No One Is Talking About This
A woman who lives online confronts real grief when her sister's baby is born with a fatal condition. Lockwood's debut novel captures internet consciousness with terrifying precision in part one, then shatters it with devastating emotional directness in part two. The structure is the argument.
Two hundred pages of single-paragraph fragments wears on readers who don't share Lockwood's very-online frame of reference; one review compares the experience to “reading a half-drunk person's Twitter feed.” Others report finishing and still not being able to say what happened, admitting flatly, “I have no idea what it was about.” The turn into the second half's family crisis draws its own complaint: some readers call it “narrative discontinuity between the two halves” and argue the emotional material would land harder without the internet-voice section attached to it. A subset of reviewers say the meme-heavy first part offers little beyond “gratuitous non-insights about digital communication,” dated the moment the references stop being current.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
