Lauren OylerFake Accounts: A Novel

I picked this up because I am a genuine fan of Oyler's critical prose—which is smart, funny, has an elegant way with metaphor, and is sometimes cuttingly mean in a (perhaps sometimes unintentionally) self-revealing way (which is actually a good thing, when it comes to critical prose).This novel is comparatively disappointing. The narrator is just self-aware enough to know that she is spectacularly self-involved, but this doesn't make her any more endearing; nor does her limited capacity for introspection and half-hearted self-criticism make her larger observations about the world any more insightful.Don't get me wrong—I don't care if a character in a novel is "unlikeable." That's a silly complaint—plenty of great art has been from the perspectives of a truly awful people, and sometimes the awfulness is very much the point. (Iago is the most interesting person in "Othello," after all.)The problem is that I am not quite sure if Oyler is herself fully aware of how her character comes across. Does she hope we will find this person sympathetic — moving in her moments of depression, intriguing and witty in her observations about contemporary culture? Or did Oyler actually intend to build her narrative around an entitled, mildly solipsistic, somewhat narrowly experienced millennial type—one who is neither as smart as she seems to think she is, nor particularly interesting even in her flaws? And if the latter, then ... why?Because it's not that she is awful, really, so much that she is ... dull. Her narcissism is entirely garden-variety, not rising to the level of a pathology; her depression, while sometimes well-conveyed, is clearly situational and never really a cause for worry; her many lies involve no real risk, and are ultimately inconsequential. (If there's no real cost to losing, is it really even gambling?) All of this rather undercuts any larger thematic point that might be being made about how the Internet has revealed the performative nature of identity, or the fictionality of the everyday — or any other shallow claim about "the way we live today" one might care to extract from the non-events of this novel. (One almost feels like patronizingly patting the narrator on the head at what (I assume) is meant to be one of the more powerful insights, towards the end, when she realizes that the achievement of an extensive social media profile is not really much of an achievement at all. "Were we not all supposed to be a little bit important online?" she plaintively wonders, as if the realization that 99% of social media postings are devoid of significance were some sort of revelation. Oh, honey, if you ever believed otherwise, you maybe aren't as clever as your teachers told you you were ...)But worse than being a bit self-involved, or being a bit naive while thinking of oneself as terribly perceptive, is confusing your privileged existence with an interesting one. Newsflash: dividing your time between Berlin and NYC doesn't make you interesting. Such a character is lucky, privileged, perhaps even somewhat enviable in their cultural opportunities ... but interesting? No. That's really not the same thing.Having said that -- a few passages in which the character disappears down the dark tunnel of obsessive Inter-netting are well written, nicely capturing the sense of fruitless exhaustion that can come from spending too long online.But I can't help feeling that the best ideas in this book would have been much better conveyed in one of Oyler's long-form articles -- without the unnecessary mask of fiction. I would look forward to reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by this author one day, but will pass on future novels.

This novel is not as atrocious as, say, Emily Gould's fiction, Benjamin Kunkel's INDECISION, or any number of poorly written superficial novels about young people in Brooklyn and their "problems" (all decidedly First World). But it is still a very bad and a very tedious book. More vacuous than a week's worth of eating nothing more than tapioca pudding. Stacked against a great recent novel such as Raven Leliani's LUSTER, which brilliantly and hilariously captured life from a young Brooklynite (but actually took chances -- something that is clearly beyond Oyler's powers), this insufferable novel is truly without insight. It's one thing to have an unlikable character anchor your work. It's quite another thing when said unlikable character is generic and uninteresting -- as the unnamed protagonist is here. Why would any self-respecting person want to read about a narcissistic archetype whining like this? Particularly a type that is quite ubiquitous in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, or the hipster pockets of Brooklyn (Bushwick, Williamsburg, and increasingly Prospect Heights)? The whole purpose of fiction is for us to meet people we might not otherwise run into. And don't get me started on the desperate lunges at nihilism, epitomized by the character's trip to Berlin. Oh, and the "twist" ending? You will see it coming a hundred pages away. (In fact, there was an opportunity here for a better and more decimating twist, but Oyler doesn't have the chops or the courage to attempt it. Had Oyler swung for the fences here, I might have held this book in higher esteem. But she settles for garbage, a surprising stance for a so-called "indie" author.)Oyler is a much better writer than Gould (truly one of the most awful writers that the Internet has ever beget), but she is without insight. She wallows in cheap cynicism because she has nothing particularly inventive or interesting to impart about the connection between real and digital life -- not that this is something that could carry a novel. She's not as clever as she thinks she is with her conceit. But she was well-connected enough to get the likes of Zadie Smith and Katie Kitamura (both loosely connected to the Catapault crowd) to stump on behalf for her mediocrity, which has been accepted without question by a number of unadventurous literary people. This book has been wrongly described as "funny" by much of this coterie. Well, if you think a tired description of a mattress as "having the thickness of INFINITE JEST" is the height of wit, then I guess you'll find this hacky novel uproarious. But I didn't laugh once. I wanted to stab my eyeballs and only made it to the end because I am a stubborn bastard. You're probably better off reading the Patricia Lockwood novel, although I haven't read it yet (but plan to).

From the beginning I quickly realised that the author was an intelligent person, with a witty sense of humour, and got excited with the prospect of a promising very enjoyable book. And then, slowly but surely, it fizzled. I kept going, certainly finding more smart bits, but growing increasingly bored by the narrator’s self-centredness and her rather pedantic pseudo philosophising on our contemporary internet personas. I am aware that the author does this intentionally, playing up the irony of the narrator embodying exactly that which is being exposed. However, for a novel to transcend, much more is needed than a segmented collection of episodes filling the gap between the expectations created at the beginning and the book’s eventual very weak ending.

Came in great condition, looking forward to reading the book.