URBAN ALIENATION AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS

Abstract

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) dramatizes the psychic condition of being “extremely online” and models with formal daring and tonal oscillation how contemporary digital life can produce both a diffuse communal intimacy and a profound kind of alienation. The novel divides into two contrasting halves: the first renders the protagonist’s immersion in the “portal” (a social-media ecosystem) through fragmentary, aphoristic prose; the second pivots into intimate, embodied grief when a family medical crisis demands attention beyond the screen. This paper argues that Lockwood stages urban alienation as an emergent property of networked culture a condition in which continuous mediated sociality displaces rooted attachment and attenuates language and that the protagonist’s search for meaning ultimately depends on an uneasy reinvestment in physical relations, narrative continuity, and the limits of representability. Close reading of the novel’s form, voice, and recurring motifs (the portal, the “we,” the phone, and the hospital room) together with critical reception and Lockwood’s own commentary illuminates how the book is both a diagnosis of contemporary alienation and a tentative ethics of presence.