the circuits that run through us

I’m very much enjoying Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, No One Is Talking About This. It’s best read on your phone late at night, preferably while lying awake in a bout of insomnia, after you’ve either exhausted your timeline or are doing your damn well best to avoid the soul suck of what Lockwood’s heroine calls The Portal.

Here’s a highlight. If this hits you where you live, this book is for you.

Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it. Thom Yorke was one of them, she thought, and curled up in her chair to watch the documentary Meeting People Is Easy. The cinematography is a speeding neon blur of streets and tilted bottlenecks and strangers, people breaking like beams through the prisms of airports, cowlicks pressed against cab windows, halls like humane mousetraps, ads where art should be, waterways gone blinding, a rich sulfur light on the drummer. It rains, it rains everything. The soundtrack blips through a fugue of interview questions, the same ones repeated over and over: music to slit your wrists to? Every shot says the circuits that run through us go everywhere, are agonizing.

You’re welcome.