Books are not necessarily elevated above social media, but they are also not eradicated by it. What is the point of this interweaving of reference and verisimilitude? Oyler posits books as products of their time - dated, in the way of Instagram posts and tweets, down to the year, or even month. When his mother sends her a little money with no explanation, she decides to move to Berlin, the city where she and Felix met.īefore she decamps for Europe, she meets with a friend and shares her predicament this friend responds with a detailed summary of a book she’s reading (mine), “a new novel with a plot that resembled my situation.” The narrator says “that it sounded like an interesting book but it made my pain feel less significant.” To which her friend replies, “It actually wasn’t less significant, because the situation in the book was fictional and mine was real.” She resolves to break up with him, but before she does he dies in a bicycle accident in upstate New York. The nameless narrator discovers that her boyfriend, Felix, has a secret Instagram account, where he posts conspiracy theories and has cultivated something of a following. Oyler’s narrative opens at a precise historical moment: the interregnum between the 2016 election and the inauguration of Donald Trump. My experience of “Fake Accounts” was not a little surreal, because a novel I wrote is the subject of one of these references (a neutral one). Her debut is packed with references to contemporary writers, from Ben Lerner to Jenny Offill. Various platforms - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and its ilk - are present not as texture, but as major motors of character and plot.īut “Fake Accounts” is also the work of a critic who has made a career of studying a much older piece of technology: the book, and in particular, the novel. These daily sins range from mere procrastination and online stalking to full-fledged impersonation and political derangement. Most readers will recognize the exhilarations and degradations of online activity that Oyler describes.
It’s a novel about social media and its insidious creep into our lives, the way it has reconfigured our behavior, relationships and - perhaps most critically, for the ambitions of this book - the way we think about and relate to ourselves. Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts” is an invigorating work, deadly precise in its skewering of people, places and things.
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