Lockwood has a clear appreciation of what it means to be both of the internet and a witness to it.

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.

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. 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. There is the 'you,' a direct message to the reader, at times solicitous, at times accusatory. She shifts between pronouns and points of view the way one might cycle between tabs late at night, half bored, half elated. She is a restless narrator, who thinks in beautiful, witty, tidy paragraphs. 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. 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. She has honed her craft on the internet, mainly on Twitter. 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. Lockwood is a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid by turns.

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