It's no easy thing to write fiction in the mode of our very online existences today, but No One Is Talking About This does it as well as anything else I've read - the fragmentary style in which the banal comes to seem aphoristic, the sense of life lived through endless filters and memes, with the personal and the political both in play (including frequent references to the dictator, ie Trump) yet always struggling for purchase against the tidal waves of content and knowingness that make up Lockwood's 'Portal'. Part one is immersive, funny, convincing and human.
How part two - in which real life makes itself unavoidably felt, with the diagnosis and then unexpected survival and birth of the narrator's sister's baby with Proteus syndrome - rubs up against that is the core of the novel, and an unexpected one by the time it arrives halfway in. I found the sections just after the diagnosis very moving, and so too those when the baby arrives and is treasured despite (because) everyone know her life expectancy can be measured in weeks or months rather than years. Each part works on its own; whether - or how - they work together is more of an open question but I think the effect is cumulative. This is a novel about being human today, and the nature of connection as well as grief, with a form that reflects the segment of life that it's about.
