The novel received critical acclaim and major attention from outlets, magazines, literary journals, and other media upon release.

"[3] The second half, which Lockwood has said is autofictional, presents a family tragedy in which the protagonist's sister's baby is born with a rare disorder.

This mirrors real-life events surrounding Lockwood's niece Lena, who was the first person ever diagnosed in utero with Proteus syndrome.

"[13] For the Chicago Tribune, John Warner observed: "She has made a novel out of life, just as Joyce did over a century ago," likening the book favorably to Ulysses.

[14] In a mixed review for the Los Angeles Times, Hillary Kelly wrote that No One Is Talking About This is "either a work of genius or an exasperating endurance trial," comparing it to the novels of Virginia Woolf: "The Waves is masterful, but there's a reason we read Mrs. Dalloway far more."

Lockwood's book itself makes direct reference to Woolf's To the Lighthouse, with which it shares a number of aesthetic and ontological concerns.

[15] NPR's Heller McAlpin called it "a tour de force that recalls Joan Didion's ... Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

"[2] Charlotte Goddu of Vanity Fair said: "The feeling one gets from reading No One Is Talking About This is that Lockwood has paid attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to what it's like to be alive right now."

Ron Charles of The Washington Post dubbed Lockwood "a master of startling concision when highlighting the absurdities we've grown too lazy to notice" and the book "a vertiginous experience, gorgeously rendered but utterly devastating.

The Wall Street Journal's Emily Bobrow called the novel "artful" and "an intimate and moving portrait of love and grief.

It tied Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty for the most notoriety out of any work from the year based on this criterion.

"[26] In individual comments, "The book’s triumph is in evoking so full a range of emotional discovery and maturing within the unpromising medium of online prattle," said Booker judge Rowan Williams.

"We’re left wondering about the processes by which language expands to cope with the expansiveness of changing human relations and perceptions at the edge of extremity.