No One Is Talking About This (2021)

 

We met up yesterday and the two of us walked down Granville Street to Granville Island, where she said, Hey, do you know this bookstore (Upstart & Crow), and the next thing I know we're inside it.

A small, spare affair, more morgue than mayhem, which is odd because the books -- laid out cadaver flat -- are but minutes old.

I picked up Sheila Heti's Pure Colour (is it Pure Color in the States?) and noted the word "God" on the first page, and that Sheila has him in the lower case ("he"). Not a good start for an atheist like myself who (a) doesn't believe in God and b) doesn't believe she's a he.

She held up Patricia Lockwood's just-out-in-paper No One is Talking About This (2021) and I thought, Maybe the most cluttered cover I've seen this year and Why stop at the deixis? What's it hiding? I read the first line -- "She opened the Portal, and the mind met her more than halfway" -- and I thought the line would flow more easily without the "more". And maybe this "this" is the Portal?

"The best book I've read in awhile," she said.

So of course I bought it.

Later that night: Ah, the Portal must be Twitter, but of course you can't call it that; America is a litigious nation. Then this revelation:

"Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world.  Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her voice sounded when she talked to people who hadn't stopped being stupid yet." (4)

(Yes, "the way her voice sounded," she wrote in the passive voice.)

Then this: 

"Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in but the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision." (9)

I'll keep reading.