Take things seriously doesn't mean being serious about them all of the time.
In contrast, considering the entire world to be an exercise in irony reduces everything to the purported laugh, the trolling or the rise. Its ultimate expression is deeply political: the real is so subordinate to the virtual that a country can be ruled from a phone. Real pain is inflicted entirely gratuitously in the name of slogans, memes and the most prosaic bigotry.
'Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian."
Yet the portal (Lockwood's term for the internet) is also the means of growth and development and escape for many.
The virtual also has in itself a certain beauty.
No One Is Talking About This conveys the lapidary sheen that comes from the perfect melding of substance and style.
"The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish-shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be made of 14 percent classical music ..."
The novel has the poetic ability to convey a huge amount in few words. It is the very best expression of the opportunities of the portal; akin to reading a succession of aperçu expressed with the precision of a haiku.
"Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis."
The opening sections are scrolling in novelistic form conveying, hilariously, the pernicious 'shared sense of humour' for which the first rule is that "I do not ask why would you do that?'
Yet as the novel proceeds the real world intrudes in such an unexpected way that the portal knows nothing and no-one on the portal can talk about it.
What emerges is need to drop the irony and the distance.
To reflect emotion. Not to just emote.
On the surface the novel is a quick, easy read. Yet, again and again, passages need to be read over for the full meaning to emerge. Partly because the construction is so clever; sometimes because the observation is so telling and illuminating, but mostly because the book is dazzling in its ability to channel the form and subvert the substance of what passes for on-line expression.
Incidentally, this piece was mostly written on an iPhone.
Apparently, so was much of the novel.
