New Yorker Fiction and "What is This Story About?"

 It's not unusual to read a work of fiction and find oneself thinking: "I wonder what this story is about?"

This is perhaps especially true with respect to the New Yorker's Nov. 23, 2020 short story entitled "The Winged Thing," by Patricia Lockwood.  Part of the problem is that it isn't actually a short story. It's an excerpt from Lockwood's forthcoming novel "No One Is Talking About This" and in effect, is an ad for that book for which Lookwood didn't have to pay, but instead presumably got paid. Wouldn't most writers love to find themselves in that position!

Basically, if you read the excerpt and you like Lockwood's style of writing, you might buy her novel and perhaps find out by reading the whole thing what she's really trying to say. Is that what this this "text" is about.

In the usual author's interview, Lockwood is first asked about her approach to the narrative -- "a protagonist who is immersed in the language of the Internet" -- and indeed there is a bit of that although in some respects, more abstract in nature than one might expect on the basis of that description. It's all about escaping suffering, we are told.

Finally, there is what happens in this excerpt.  The apparently younger sister of the unnamed chief character, a woman who may be a lesbian ("Back in Ohio and heterosexual again," she says at one point), is about to have a baby that appears to be developing in the womb in an abnormal fashion bringing up, among other things, the possibility of an abortion.

There, Lockwood spins out a convincing and thought-provoking narrative of all that might go on in such a situation and as a result, one could easily conclude it's what the story is about. Except for two things. First, this is just a small segment of a novel and second, in her interview, Lockwood says that the significance of the episode is that it plucks the main character out of her online life and puts her "back into the body that suffers." And that then leads Lockwood into a rather puzzling explanation of the nature of language.

What is this story about?