It’s a lonely feeling to find oneself unmoved by a book that’s been borne aloft in the sweaty grasp of universal acclaim. If it’s bad enough, one’s initial shrug (“there’s no accounting for taste”) yields to outrage, even paranoia: No way do people mean everything they’ve been tweeting or, worse, claiming at generous length in the pages of respectable magazines. The reader who endures this experience regularly will, for his or her sanity’s sake, try to identify critics who break with the palm frond-waving sycophants. Lauren Oyler, writing in the Baffler or the London Review of Books, is one such critic. Where others fawn over the emperor’s new clothes, Oyler takes creepshots and posts them so that the rest of us might point and laugh, reassured of our sound judgment.
“I’d like to see you try writing a book” is the moron’s challenge to an exacting critic. Sometimes, the critic answers the call. Now Oyler is being borne aloft for her debut novel, Fake Accounts, and the fanfare carries a whiff of apotropaic magic, like calling the Furies “the Kindly Ones” to appease them or escape their notice.
Fake Accounts is, as its ingenious title suggests, both about the “extremely online” and about deception in personal relationships. In the former context, the “fake accounts” are anons, sock puppets, bots, and sowers of misinformation; in the latter, they are the “fake accounts” we give of ourselves in order to live, or something. Our narrator, a confidently transparent stand-in for Oyler’s critical voice and for the international travel parts of her biography, learns that her boyfriend, Felix, secretly operates a popular conspiracy meme Instagram account. That this is treated as such an earth-shaking discovery, closer to the “child pornography” than “nerdy hobby” end of the spectrum, may be less puzzling in the wake of the QAnon-fueled Capitol raid, but what little we see of Felix’s content seems squarely in the joke or satire category (“his most recent picture . . . warned of radio-frequency devices planted in the flora of every country on earth . . . except North Korea”).
One of Oyler’s most quotable passages appears in her review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. In part: “The moral obviousness of most contemporary [culture] has been a boon for these writers, who tend to find simple things complicated and complicated things simple.” The simple thing that Oyler’s premise requires us to find complicated is this: The imperative to protect people from their own gullibility is hardly self-evident. Having fun at the expense of Americans’ stupidity, as Felix does, is as American as Mark Twain, P. T. Barnum, and Orson Welles. The truth can be misread, art can inflame, claims or ideas we wouldn’t dream of removing from circulation have been more detrimental in their application than “chemtrails” or “Illuminati sex dungeons” could ever hope to be. Oyler, who scoffed in an interview at the idea that the Trump era posed special challenges to fiction or interpretation, ought to understand that. So, if Felix initially makes for an anemic antagonist, does this book still land?
Mostly yes, both because Oyler is such an observant commentator and talented prose stylist and because Fake Accounts, for all its fixation on internet culture, is interested in IRL relationships. Oyler’s narrator learns about Felix, for instance, by snooping in his phone, arguably a less abstract, more personal violation of trust than Felix’s nerdy hobby, though it may be bad manners to note that the righteous are always more concerned with humanity than with individuals. “I was overtaken by a sense of purpose,” she writes, “unlike anything I could recreate in a workplace environment.”
Read as a satire of modern life and mores, Fake Accounts suggests a pretty old-fashioned “take”: Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Of course, the hands in Fake Accounts do look busy, scrolling, swiping, tapping, texting. Instead of relying on our shared, exhaustive, and exhausting knowledge, Oyler describes soon-to-be-superseded technologies and practices in meticulous, anthropological detail. This provides Seinfeldian laughs—about the trauma of an animated ellipsis that never resolves itself into a message, about the horror of seeing one’s texts, robbed of inflection or charm, on someone else’s phone—as well as a painful reminder of the absurdity to which we’ve submitted.
We look busy, but we aren’t. There isn’t much work happening in Fake Accounts. Our heroine writes. She meets Felix in Berlin, where he’s a pub-crawl tour guide. When some Brazilians assert that “Prague is Disney,” older readers may register uneasily that pretentious Americans have been self-conscious about their grand tours for ages; Prague was already regarded as a Disney destination when Noah Baumbach made Kicking and Screaming a quarter century ago. Anxiety about travel and privilege is dramatized more effectively here than Berlin is. Told that a friend is Instagramming from Australia, Felix does “the only normal thing a person could do when presented with such information,” which is to just barely feign interest. The TL;DR of the creative-class Eurotrip is that the beer is cheap and you can drink outside, which you will do instead of going to museums.
Still, Oyler is good at depicting and picking apart social life, wherever it happens to occur: Brooklyn, Berlin, Twitter. She understands the moves people make in jockeying for social or romantic position, the little tricks of manipulative self-presentation that bleed freely from online to real life and back again. During her first sexual encounter with Felix, she privately mocks his performative indifference to her period: “as if that would make him seem especially sensually in thrall about the female body and not like every man I’d slept with.” But elsewhere, she voices an anxiety that she’s “insufficiently sexually strange,” which comes from the same place. The book is replete with such bits of neurotic criticism and self-criticism, but the shock of recognition is at times more bug zapper than cattle prod.
Eventually, though, the smart, nihilistic, somewhat grating, only intermittently fascinating Felix does something really interesting: He dies. Our narrator is sent money by Felix’s mother to attend a memorial service, but she keeps it for herself and goes abroad again (she and Felix had been dating stateside). Felix’s passing frees her up to do some thinking, and the middle portion of the book is a freewheeling monologue about life, identity, truth, self-deception, social class, social media, feminism and its contradictions, modern love, literature, you name it. That this reads like an essay and not a novel doesn’t mean it isn’t a pleasure, full of wit and insight, and further proof that Oyler is a critic to watch and, if one is a writer oneself, to watch out for.
It does mean, to paraphrase Twain, that anyone attempting to find a plot in Fake Accounts will be disappointed. It’s all fabula, no syuzhet, as a Russian troll might put it. There’s a twist, a big damn twist; whether it’s a surprise depends on how strictly you expect Oyler to cleave to the rules of her own social realism. But nothing much happens and nobody much changes and the only matter satisfactorily settled is that Oyler is smarter and more perceptive than everybody around her, which, sorry, kinda seems like the point?
The narrator calls herself the most important if not most intriguing person in her narrative. A second reading of Fake Accounts cements one’s initial suspicion that this is a bunch of “I who am but dust and ashes” false modesty. Felix is much like any other sharp, bored, underutilized, ethically atrophied young man in search of an identity. So what that he “liked to tell strangers little, inconsequential lies,” which has been shorthand for mischief and spontaneity in rom-coms for decades? Any single line of Oyler’s inventive description of him—Felix as tour guide is “like a middle-school teacher with a naughty inner life: when he’s on the clock it’s just a subversive source of confidence to him” — is more compelling than most of what he says or does. What it compels is the understanding that Oyler (we may now abandon the convention “our narrator”) is not only the most intriguing but the only person in Fake Accounts. Her brain is the star. Let’s hope for a sequel.