No One Is Talking About This

“The words merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”

The book is rich with these perfect digressions and Patricia Lockwood gets a ton of leeway for writing the absolutely fantastic Priestdaddy ...but this reads like an advanced AI was fed Twitter posts and Reddit memes and forced to regurgitate a tragicomic novel.

Lockwood is a Grand Master Twitter user and there is no shortage of fragmentary emissions here that will elicit an ahahahahaha! (the newer, funnier way to laugh - don't ask me about sneazing) But you still have to read this like a novel and not the endless doom-scrolling consumption the internet invites. And I think that's what broke me.

Besides, it's hard to keep up with the online easter eggs. While some memes like the “this is fine” dog can reach ubiquitous status so that even the normies on Facebook are gleefully reposting it as a reaction to the last year, most bits of online ephemera never rise above their brief, blazing week of relevance. We're all ants now? Big Hero 6 suddenly relevant? What's up with Ocean Spray Cranberry juice or Gorilla Glue? Is everyone eating ass now?

And just as Twitter can foster an endless stream of hot takes, irreverent shit-posts and ironic trolling it can just as quickly offer up flashes of sincerity and heart. Here too the book switches gears in the second half when the protagonist's sister's baby is diagnosed with Proteus syndrome - mirroring Lockwood's neice's condition that would ultimately take her life at 6 months of age.

Lockwood is momentarily seized with doubt “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?” The endless scroll turns stream of consciousness and you remember that before she was writing enigmatic tweets like “can a dog be twins” Lockwood was a poet and memoirist of the highest order. The book didn't fire on all cylinders for me but I will still pick up anything she writes.