She spends her time in bed engaged in “spellbound reading” of her phone-exactly the same reading that everybody else is doing. That passage is one of several in which Lockwood tries out labels (with exclamation marks!) for the kind of book she is writing: “The plot! That was a laugh.” What hope for storyline, when the novel simply follows the Lockwood character, an Internet obsessive, obsessing about the Internet? She scrolls, she showers, and she scrolls some more. She trusts us to keep up to speed, to catch meaning off the current vectors and to keep it circulating. She jollies us along, leading us through the language and styles of ever more evolved platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), without explicitly naming any of them. There is something very winning about Lockwood’s abundant faith not only that we can but that we will follow her. The novel is all about the importance of being in the know, and it won’t work unless we are prepared to join in, parsing the anecdotes. Lockwood expects her reader to work hard.
Are we doomed to think of Nora’s farts in tandem with Ulysses from now on? I think she hopes so. And there’s the mildly disturbing awareness that Lockwood has got one over on us, with her disenchanting substitution of Joyce’s sexual fantasies for Joyce the writer as a whole. There’s the irony that stream-of-consciousness in James Joyce (for the fart-lover is he, and the joke works properly only if we know it) involves inhabiting a mind not entirely our own, in which we are acted on as much as acting. There’s the pleasure of knowing that we need to hear “viral” in “contagious” in order to get the joke about shared behavior on and off the Internet, tweeting and yawning (and the satisfaction of knowing that she knows that we know that in stopping short of an explicit coronavirus allusion she is making a point).
Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species. “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?” One audience member yawned, then another.
“Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him,” she tells the audience. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends-all of whom appear in the novel-but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world online, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review. She is, like Lockwood herself, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. “Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This.
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