Reality and online life clash: No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood, reviewed

Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood isn’t one of them. She is straightforwardly hit-the-rubber-nail-on-the-head funny. There are punchlines, there are callbacks. On Twitter she is known for her zany ‘sexts’: ‘I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me.’ In 2013 she went viral with her prose-poem ‘Rape Joke’, which was deliberately, powerfully not funny, yet still let in some killer laughs. (‘The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.’) Her memoir Priestdaddy (2017) featured a hilarious, tender portrait of her guitar-shredding, gun-loving Catholic priest father.

No One is Talking About This is her first novel. ‘This’ refers to ‘the portal’, the book’s word for the internet. ‘She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.’ Lockwood employs a format popularised by Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill: each discrete section of prose is on average eight lines long, occasionally longer, often shorter. These tweet-style utterances are separated by asterisks. It can make for an arresting rhythm, full of pregnant pauses and comic juxtapositions.

The strenuously entertaining narrator doesn’t do much. She looks at the portal and takes the occasional shower. Soon you’re wondering how long she can keep it up. Then, Part Two begins and we’re jolted out of the portal. A real-life event has overtaken the narrator: her sister’s pregnancy is complicated. The family find themselves up against an arcane, inhumane US law relating to when babies can be delivered.