There Is No Offline

Patricia Lockwood’s delightful and disconcerting novel gives the web a whole new spin

- Tanushri Shukla

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS

by Patricia Lockwood BLOOMSBURY

My father, who is well into his 70s has a quaint, endearing habit of sending texts that follow the linguistic rules of handwritten letters. They begin, “Dear Tanu”, line break, the message and end “Love, Pa”. Even when we are texting back and forth, talking in real time. I smile and never say “Love, Tanu” in return, because texting to me is not English but an altogether new language with no punctuation or salutations or sign-offs. When did I learn this language and why did my father not?

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This reminded me of my father’s texts and that feeling of gentle bemusement I get in the moment in which the lines blur between online and offline. Written more as an endless long scroll than a novel, Lockwood’s bite-sized paragraphs and tweetable sentences are pithy and meme-worthy.

“Why were we all writing like this now?” the unnamed narrator asks—apparently an online celebrity, famous for her irreverent tweets—because, “it was the way the portal wrote”. Or because it was the way we wrote the portal?