The Chungus Era

An autopsy of irony-left literary fiction and an analysis of the author Patricia Lockwood.

This essay was originally published on the blog A Good Hard Stare in February of 2025.

Was there a “vibe shift”? A few weeks ago, the intelligentsia decided to weigh in on the question of whether the recent election did or did not mark our very own Cielo Drive moment, an instance of the intellectual and creative daemon of our culture flapping its wings, taking briefly aloft, and alighting on a new set of values. Generally, this is not a question that much interests me and I never play the pundit if I can help it. But something happened while I was reading these various arguments that I have to, however reluctantly, mark as a strong piece of evidence for the “yes” column. What happened was this: a voice came out of the whirlwind. I was consumed with a vision. A name, a command suddenly flashed inside my mind, vivid as the burning bush, written in electric fire. Patricia Lockwood, it said, You need to read Patricia Lockwood.

Why her? Because there used to be a different reigning sensibility, the sensibility of pre-Musk Twitter. It was marked by a mix of cheerful absurdity and schoolyard viciousness, it took the world as a joke while being absolutely serious when boundaries were transgressed. It spawned a mode of speaking: dry sarcasm, flights of absurdity, Ironic Capitals and exclamation points. Lockwood was the poet laureate of this old guard, the fullest expression of the kind of writer that could be produced by these social circumstances. She is the best of them, far from being a craven culture warrior or a mediocre social climber she is a real talent, a stylist of unique vitality and vision. Now the heat of that era has quickly cooled. Names I used to see cracking wise on the topic of the day have been scattered to the wind; some have secured jobs writing for streaming shows, some have started families, many have retreated to Bluesky, swooning around in an empty mansion like Norma Desmond, pretending it’s still 2017. So I feel as if now I can start to see Lockwood clearly, and can begin to see the shape of that era without the discourse pounding my head, making it impossible to concentrate. There was always something about her I couldn't come to terms with, something that bothered me. Only now can I begin to figure out why.

Here are some of my notes from the time I spent with a few of her essays and her debut novel No One is Talking About This:

It’s like being trapped in the being john malkovich scene where everyone is Patricia Lockwood

Reading her is like being conscripted into her consciousness. It makes you want to shut it all out, become a bird or a coyote

This alien intelligence, this sensibility that clashes violently with my own.

it is like an endless maze, you can’t get out…lockwood, lockwood, lockwood, lockwood

A little melodramatic, perhaps. But this is both her great skill and her great defect; she has a power of sight and description that overwhelms. There are few writers who can communicate as vividly the experience of what it is like to be them. But when you’re reading her, her consciousness expands to fill yours, it is not a mutual partnership but an imposition. There is no room for others. Behind every door you open is another Patricia Lockwood.

Let’s begin with the critical work. 6,767-word pieces in the London Review of Books on deeply unfashionable authors do not usually go viral, but that is how she first came into my view, with “Malfunctioning Sex Robot,” a widely celebrated essay on John Updike. Its opening has a strong claim to being the most iconic passage of literary criticism written in the 21st century thus far:

I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

The essay, like “Where Be Your Jibes Now?” its 2023 spiritual sequel on David Foster Wallace, proceeds to careen through Updike’s oeuvre and Lockwood’s experience with it, in language of startling energy and vigor. It is full of quotable lines, phrases that are mentioned in conjunction with Updike to this day. Despite the opening and several good punches landed, it is far from simple polemic. It gleefully savages his worst qualities—misogyny, myopia, and purple prose—but acknowledges his good ones and ultimately ends in a place of grudging fondness. In short, it does just what I’m doing now, takes on at length a predecessor that alternately thrills and vexes, wrestles with a complicated affection.

But there’s a problem. In between the zingers, things get vague, foggy. One begins to wonder whether her striking style is the right tool for the task at hand. When she doesn’t like a book (Couples), she describes it like this:

Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the beginning of Rabbit, Run had spilled and seeped into the text. Dim, carpeted, brown, pressing our faces perpetually into the plaid of some couch. It is also the book in which Updike becomes 25 per cent more interested in feet, which is not something the world needed.

When she does like it (The Centaur), she describes it like this:

The book is seen through surreal endless eyes, like mythological cups into which the world is poured and poured.

Most of the essay, the bits that don’t get retweeted, is like this. These are nice images, but what do they really tell us? Don’t they just make Updike a springboard from which a series of poetic observations can be launched? I don’t think criticism needs to be a buyer’s guide, but I do think the best critics have a certain generosity of spirit. They might write well, but it is in the service of getting out of the way so the subject can be seen, in both its beauty and its flaws. When I see that Lockwood has written on an author I am interested in, I am usually vaguely disappointed, because I know I will get a lot of Lockwood and very little of the topic. Rarely has she illuminated something new or unexpected about an author, she has instead put that author through the Lockwoodizer 3000 and turned in the result. Here is one of my favorite passages of critical prose, Peter Schjeldahl describing a Willem de Kooning exhibition:

Like the bus in the thriller Speed, this masterpieces-only retrospective never slows down and thus is hard to board. How I did it was to stroll nonstop through the show, finally pausing in the last room with the eerily deliberate paintings of de Kooning's dotage that lay out rudiments of his genius like silk ties on a bedspread. I studied those works that have no historical precedent that I can think of. Then I left the show and nonchalantly walked back in at the beginning, going straight to Pink Lady (1944) and giving it my full attention. The effect was like a plane taking off, when the acceleration presses you against the seat. The painting's violent intelligence detonated pleasure after pleasure. When I turned around, everything in the show was singing its lungs out. Half an hour later I was beaten to a pulp of joy. I'll rest and go back for more.

Schjeldahl is very similar to Lockwood in certain ways. They are bodily critics, who attempt to describe the feeling of an encounter with art in ways that transcend the cerebral—Schjeldahl in some sort of light BDSM situation with de Kooning, Lockwood saying of Infinite Jest “My main sense memory is of it digging into my pussy when I propped it on my lap; one can only think this was by design.” They both began their careers as poets, and their language is constantly surprising, inventive, and precise. But when I read Schjeldahl I want to drop what I’m doing and sprint to the nearest museum. He turns switches and lights up currents in your brain, makes you see things differently than you did before you read him. You can say criticism is an egoistic act—who the hell are you to tell me what to think?—but at its best it makes me feel as if I had had a priceless gift in my lap, and never noticed it. Meanwhile with Lockwood I feel as if I have been dropped into a maze where all the turns lead to her grinning face. Reading her literary criticism is like standing in a gallery trying to look at a finely realized portrait of her subject. In front of it, refusing to move, is Lockwood, taking a selfie.

But enough of this criticism of criticism. What about something that actually matters: the novel? With No One Is Talking About This, published in 2021, Lockwood made a game attempt at the great internet novel, more specifically the great Twitter novel, something many have tried and none have yet accomplished. Her approach to the problem of writing meaningfully about going online is one of defamiliarization. Starring a Twitter-addicted writer who is more or less Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This is written in short bursts of observations, a paragraph or less, mirroring the experience of scrolling and the stream of information on “the portal,” the euphemism this novel uses to avoid the embarrassment of typing the word “Twitter” out dozens and dozens of times. These observations and glimpses of life are rendered in vivid Lockwoodian argot, attempting to make strange the everyday. When I opened the book, I thought she really might have accomplished something.

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.

Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man's erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words STOP! DON'T EMAIL MY WIFE!

Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?

She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.

I quite like this; a latter-day Stephen Dedalus considering the ineluctable modality of the digital. But social media, being so common and moreover so widely disliked even and especially by its heavier users, requires an excess of defamiliarization, more than can be sustained over even a few pages in a mainstream literary novel. So by page 10 or so, the book wavers, collapses, and becomes in part a straightforward description of things from Online.

Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.

In these bad stretches, it often becomes banal remember-when. Remember Cat Person? Remember the Folgers incest commercial? Don’t worry, descriptions of those utterly ephemeral and meaningless viral moments are here on the page with only a sprinkle of lyrical descriptive seasoning, preserved for some deranged future historian. At the very least, this section is an effective inoculation against social media. I read the first half of No One is Talking About This in the morning, before I started work. When at work I inevitably got distracted and went to tab over to my own portal, I felt suddenly nauseous, able to comprehend the true horror of what I was looking at. But you don’t need a novel for that, you can get the same hangover feeling from a day of excessive scrolling.

Even worse, Lockwood sometimes can’t resist turning her hat backwards, flipping the chair around, and having a rap session about the importance of voting blue. One of these millennial Twitter leftists once observed that the reason the right wasn’t funny was that right-wingers would start to tell a joke and halfway through they would get too mad and forget to finish. Unfortunately, in hindsight we can see that this was true of the left as well.

Of course when the eclipse came, the dictator stared directly into it, as if to say that nature had no dominion over him either.

In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?

This was always a problem for Weird Twitter and its orbiters. Everything is absurd and meaningless except for earnest millennial progressivism, which is a deadly serious matter. Look, I’m not writing esoterically here; I’m basically on their side; my views, at the end of the day, don’t diverge far from this. But you can play the cosmic holy fool or the Bolshevik on the barricades, to play both is untenable. If you went to a performance of Beckett or Ionesco, it would be deflating if midway through the actors turned to you and gave an impassioned monologue about how but seriously folks, Democracy is On the Ballot.

Lockwood, of course, is smart enough to realize that just describing internet addiction is not nearly enough to sustain a novel, even a slim one, so halfway through, humanism rears its head and the novel becomes A Christmas Carol, where the part of Scrooge is played by the not-Lockwood protagonist, the part of miserliness is played by being too online, and the part of the three ghosts is played by her sister’s new baby, who is born with a rare and deadly genetic condition and lives for only a few months. The experience of this brief life, the sudden rushing in of the weightiest questions of IRL, causes not-Lockwood to pick up her head from the screen, look around her, and by the end of the novel, achieve a fuller, more integrated personhood.

Or so one might hope. The second half of the book did, as they used to say, get me in the feels a few times—how could it not, given her undeniable skill and the subject matter?—but something was missing. Once again, it’s the same thing: all Lockwood, all the time. I mention A Christmas Carol because I listened to it again last year, when I had a side gig delivering groceries to the Ebenezers of the world, and despite being one of the most frequently performed and adapted stories in modern history, the original remains playful, enthralling, and yes, moving. Why do we thrill to Scrooge’s transformation, but not not-Lockwood’s? Because Scrooge is shown who he is in relation to those around him; he comes to the epiphany that he has been shaped by the people in his life and he has the awesome power to shape theirs. The other characters in No One is Talking About This—the protagonist’s conservative father, her nice if slightly dim sister, her husband (about whom I couldn’t even think of one adjective, he is simply Husband)—are cyphers, when they appear they have these vaguely sketched qualities but nothing more. This is what I mean when I speak of feeling trapped by Lockwood; her writing is so self-possessed that other people barely seem to exist at all.

Why did I feel such a sudden urge to write about her, anyway? Why did the muse of criticism suddenly shout in my ear? There would be no point in digging up one of Lockwood’s novel-of-posting contemporaries, say, Fake Accounts, just to bury it. But she demands some sort of reckoning with, at least as a cautionary tale and an illustration of how writers are shaped by their times. Here is someone with genuinely formidable linguistic powers, who might under the right temporal and social circumstances have formed into a Rossetti, a Hopkins, even a Joyce. But Hopkins had God and Joyce had Dublin and Twitter is not a very good substitute for either of those. Of course, it’s too soon to write her off. The world of literature I met when I started life in the adult world, around 2017, felt cramped, airless, full of aphoristic autofiction and navel-gazing social narratives. Channels that could have been productive were diverted by the culture to create something like No One is Talking About This. But over the past few years, despite the continued degradation of our political and media spheres, I feel there have been at least glimmerings of new possibilities and new energies over the horizon.

I can’t put all my hopes in the Substack platform the way some of my contemporaries do, being mindful of the fact that it is subject to the same set of incentives that entice other products of Silicon Valley to slow degradation. But I do feel that, through several new developments in our collective artistic and social life, a window has been opened for writers of like mind to find one another, outside the stultifying confines of the academy and the prestige magazine and the Twitter panopticon, and that we may be in a moment of possibility even as art itself faces a new iteration of a familiar challenge: that of being swallowed by the machine. I hope Lockwood, whose second novel is due in September, can rise to the changing circumstances and take tentative steps into what feels most important at this hour: the world beyond the self.