To her two poetry collections and a bestselling memoir (PRIESTDADDY), Patricia Lockwood now has added a novel that skillfully pairs a ruthlessly unsentimental portrait of online culture with a poignant story of a family coping with the life and death of a young child. It’s a daring juxtaposition of content and themes, but Lockwood executes the pirouette with a grace that allows these pieces to fit together in a coherent whole.

As if to mimic her own social media experience of 93,000 followers and a reputation for edgy tweets, Lockwood creates a narrator who manages to achieve renown in the “portal” (her name for social media) when her post --- “Can a dog be twins?” --- goes viral. Her sudden, unexpected eminence earns her invitations “to speak from what felt like a cloud bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information,” describing this “spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk.” She spends most of her time on airplanes and in glamorous locales with others of similar stature in the online world. “This did not feel like real life, exactly,” she admits, “but nowadays what did?”

"[Lockwood's] real achievement is to create an opportunity to reflect on the stark contrast between the synthetic connection offered by social media and the way real connection works on the most intimate level."

Lockwood’s narrator compares people living in the portal to rats in an experiment, pressing a button to get a pellet. “But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet,” she writes. “When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.” She frets about “the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own. One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you.” But in its absence lurks the seductive feeling of “not just like being away from a body, but a warm body that wanted her.”

There’s a timeless quality to the flow of the narrator’s intensely self-aware observations that will feel familiar to anyone who spends any amount of time on social media. But Lockwood doesn’t pass up the opportunity to land some pointed political commentary, with references to videos of police violence (“The labored officious breathing of the policemen, which was never the breathing that stopped”) and an immediately recognizable figure she calls the “dictator,” whose ascent the portal made possible. “This was humiliating,” she writes. “It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.” The predominant feeling of it all is similar to the one you get when you spend an hour scrolling your Twitter or Facebook feed, except this one is curated by a smart, literate companion.

But for all the rueful truth and wit Lockwood brings to her depiction of online culture, NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS achieves real emotional resonance in its second half. Here she pivots to the story of the birth, short life and death of the narrator’s niece, who suffers from Proteus syndrome, a rare disorder that manifests as an unchecked growth of tissue, something similar to the disease that afflicted Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.

This deeply affecting account, based on Lockwood’s own experience, describes how the narrator’s globetrotting is transformed into flights home to Ohio to spend precious time with her family. She admits she “was no longer an expert in anything, let alone what was going on,” but as her world narrows, it deepens, culminating in a deeply moving scene of her niece’s death and its aftermath. When she reemerges to deliver a lecture on the portal at the British Museum, it is as a profoundly changed human being:

“It was fitting finally to appear in that place, an exhibit herself and from far away, collaged together in body and mind, monstrous in the eyes of the future, an imbecile before the Rosetta Stone, disturber of the deadest tombs, butterfly catcher and butterfly killer, soon to be folded between two pages herself, and speak about the giftedness of little and large things.”

Lockwood’s fragmented, discursive style is reminiscent of writers like Jenny Offill (DEPT. OF SPECULATION) and Sarah Manguso (ONGOINGNESS). Especially in the novel’s first section, it takes some time to settle into the rhythm of her prose, which can veer from black humor (imagining Alexa “filing their conversations away carefully in case they all murdered each other at some point”) to aphoristic wisdom (“Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money”) to self-revelation, as she imagines how the portal “passed into you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began,” in the course of a few paragraphs. But once you have yielded to that seductive beat, you’ll find yourself nodding along, almost as if listening to a silent piece of music.

It’s possible to read a shelf of books like Nicholas Carr’s THE SHALLOWS, or watch the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, without gaining a better representation of the lived experience of social media than the one Lockwood offers in NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. But her real achievement is to create an opportunity to reflect on the stark contrast between the synthetic connection offered by social media and the way real connection works on the most intimate level. In the end, we are the ones who get to choose.