GIVEN THAT I laughed at some point in almost every page of Priestdaddy, Lockwood's new novel (her first) seemed a likely candidate to be funny, but the second half took a very serious (and moving) turn.
Could we call this autofiction? Lockwood has become a go-to panelist and lecturer on the topic of social media and internet culture, and the first person narrator of No One Is Talking about This likewise gets invited all over the world to talk about social media, thanks to her question "Can a dog be twins?" going viral. The first half of the book is in the whipcrack, quick-take style of Lockwood's essay on social media, "The Communal Mind" (London Review of Books, 21 Feb. 2019), and is often hilarious. The narrator's husband and parents feel very continuous with the husband and parents of Priestdaddy. In short, even though Priestdaddy is a memoir and this new one a novel, the novel feels like a sequel.
The autofiction question emerges more sharply in the second half, as the narrator's niece is born with Proteus Syndrome (which may be what Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man," had) and dies having lived just a bit longer than six months. Not many laughs here. Delight, joy, wonder, and gratitude all surface, as well as grief and sorrow, but you wouldn't call it funny...you might well call it extraordinarily moving and heartbreakingly real, though.
And it turns out that Lockwood's own sister did have a daughter with Proteus Syndrome, so the portrait of a family in these circumstances is intimate, close to the bone. In that respect, it put me in mind of Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, another fiction based on a closely-observed. family tragedy.
No One Is Talking about This was not quite what I was expecting, then, but wound up exceeding my expectations. Another brilliant prose turn by Lockwood. I hope she hasn't abandoned poetry, though.
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