“... weakness in her writing is the sentences. ‘I don’t think my prose is fantastic,’ she told Patricia Lockwood in an interview two years ago – I felt this when I started taking notes on Intermezzo, but hadn’t thought much about it before. As I lay in the sun reading galleys dog-eared by three colleagues before me, the point of a Sally Rooney ...”

“... His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. Literary legacy in our scrappy century is harder to maintain if you lose female readers, and the letters aren’t likely to stem the migration or win over ...”

“... used to tell me to do.”’ Add some internet, and we arrive at the startling first sentence of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This. ‘She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway.’In both novels, crisis takes the form of a trick played by nature on culture. Lockwood’s unnamed ...”