This novel sort of does you in. That could be the whole review, if I did not write reviews for a living. It’s like when you are served a cup of coffee and you get tea, and it tastes weird, although it’s perfectly fine.
Maybe more like a cocktail you agree to drink with friends at a bar, even though you know it’s sake and Marmite together: two things you love separately, but dashed with something sickly sweet, mixed in the same glass and served cold. You might find yourself a bit pukey and cross with yourself as you spin away into the night, kind of wishing you hadn’t indulged and that you’d listened to yourself.
But then, on the other hand, rather glad you experienced it, even if it was a bit odd.
I am so confused. I wanted to love it. I might love it. Do I love it? I finished it three hours back, and I’ve already recommended it to three people. At this rate, twenty-four people will be looking it up by tomorrow on my recommendation. I think I want them to read it, so I can figure it out with someone else, what the weird thing is that makes it a bit too sharp.
I suppose half the issue was I expected a pithy Lauren Oyler-like read, a comment on modern life online. But that’s not what this book becomes, although I wonder if that was how it started.
Lockwood has created in the first half of her book (I use the noun loosely here) an ever-scrolling musing on how it is to become a social media ‘star’ based on a few memes. As the protagonist wanders mostly in and sometimes out of what she calls The Portal, she wonders if her cup of tea got put down inside the screen as her brain loses boundaries. This part of the book uncovers a shallow, insecure shadow completely enveloped in her own reflection, glaring at the world through her phone, stuck on constant scroll.
She is idiotic, forcefully so, in order to get likes and followers, posing questions such as “can a dog be twins?”, shamelessly realizing how it will impact on the last shreds of culture flailing in The Portal. During this section, I laughed heartily, Lockwood’s cynicism and nihilism is clever and touching, as online society examines and compares everything from fungal issues to plastic boxes for no good reason while her husband tries his best to touch her edges.
But also, I couldn’t stop scrolling while reading this book on my Kindle. And I started feeling sick, my brain filling with crap, growing…
Then the book swings into a semi-autobiographical part two, with her sister’s pregnancy and subsequent birth of a daughter with Proteus Syndrome, the same condition as Joseph Merrick, known as The Elephant Man.
The baby is not expected to live, but she does, and the woman starts not going into The Portal but carries on her narration in the same way she would write online. The baby’s head grows uncontrollably to an inevitable end, while the child constantly craves new things. While the woman’s sister is worn to a nub, and ecstatically so, the woman starts to find connection outside of online.
However (there is always however) I did not like Lockwood putting these two parts together. Yes, there is a tenuous link between the child’s head and The Portal. The baby is cherished like a deity in a cult, as the internet is, and both are very, very sick.
I think my issue is that I don’t like the internet’s sickness being compared to the niece of Patricia Lockwood. Maybe it feels uncouth. Much like the Marmite and sake together in a cold glass, the goodness of both drains out in the partaking, and the book does get rather too sugary for my taste.
But reader, I cried at the end.
It’s a haunting book, and so very much better than most of the crappy writing being passed off as good writing at the moment. But I will be relieved when we’re over the “I wrote this in Lockdown” hump and there are more things for young novel writers to contemplate than Donald Trump’s presidency and memes that don’t make sense.
Reading this on a Kindle may be the best way to inhale this novel, because the meta of scrolling while the character is scrolling is a unique and dizzying experience. And yes, I do recommend it, if only so we can all discuss it later.
I found the novel, despite its obvious strengths, peddling a common trope about disability as a source of inspiration – a kind of “at least you’ve got your health”.