Fake accounts

by Lauren Oyler, Marta Barone (Translator)

A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive debut novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell.

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Novels, Book Club, Feminism

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 2, 2021

About the author

Lauren Oyler's essays on books and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, The Guardian, New York magazine’s The Cut, The New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.

Reviews

[Jack Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

i would've faked my own death to get away from her too

[Ausma · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was appallingly bad. That so many people edited (though clearly not very thoroughly) and reviewed and actually got through this slog of a 272 page novel and still concluded that it’s heralding in some new era or genre of contemporary millennial fiction is... well, yikes, to say the least!

The marketing of this novel promised an ~*extremely online*~-style story centered around the narrator’s discovery that her boyfriend is peddling conspiracy theories on Instagram on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. That plot is discarded after the first 30 pages and instead serves (unconvincingly) as the impetus for her not-so-transformative foray into the Berlin dating scene, and the book then devolves into a running log of her takes on any topic even tangentially related to the events of the Trumpian era.

As a fan of "plotless" books, I'm not averse to streams of consciousness, meandering philosophical arguments, and paragraphs devoid of periods. What makes Oyler's novel so unpalatable is that it is saturated with self-obsession; she obviously considers herself much more perceptive than she actually is (I say “she/herself” because it’s very hard for me to believe, given the similarities between the two, that the narrator could be anything but a reflection of Oyler and that this is more memoir than novel). She affords her every thought an importance it simply does not have to anyone but herself, and the way she marvels at her own brain gets exhausting real fast (at least she admits that she finds herself “fascinating”). Endless paragraphs that are supposed to come off as totally original or “shocking” analyses of the sociopolitical moment read like takes I’ve heard a million times in the post-2016 discourse on Twitter. The plot evaporates so quickly that it seems like every situation gets into only operates as a jumping off point into her political commentary that seems like it would’ve been better off in essay form. Despite the setting being so grounded in the Trump era, Oyler’s own experiences during those four years (hell, a whole long-winded section of the book is set at the 2017 Women’s March), and the opportunity both of those elements present, the book has nothing revelatory to say about millennials coming of age during that time. It only echoes what other generations already attack us for all the time: that we’re just narcissists and phone addicts.

If that is indeed the point Oyler is trying to make — that the internet (social media in particular) has turned us all into narcissists because of how we’re always constructing and monitoring our online personas, setting ourselves at the center of these virtual worlds and begging for attention with every post — then it’s a quite poorly executed, long-winded argument. Anyone who uses social media on a regular basis already knows this; reading Oyler rehash her every answer to dating site prompts doesn’t allow us to understand anything more about the self-centeredness involved in curating an online persona. She doesn’t even make use of the situation with her conspiracy theorist boyfriend to raise questions about how our current internet landscape could drive someone to join such a delusional cause beyond concluding that, well, some people are just impressionable and/or bored, and after all, I guess you really never know anyone.

It’s almost like, because Oyler has a following on Twitter, a fan of her tweets pitched her to write a book based on and/or composed of them — what I’m sure most would agree is a terrible concept. An inner monologue-type feed that bounces between topics works on a platform like Twitter, where most people are pretty self-absorbed (so constantly writing about inconsequential moments of your life doesn’t seem quite so vain) and pithy, relatable tweets about the modern human condition perform well. Also, crucially, most people tend not to take what they tweet so seriously as to think it could be turned into a nearly 300-page novel. Oyler’s contemplations feel unoriginal, are quickly exhausted yet still drawn out, and are delivered with the same defensiveness as "hot takes," like she anticipates an entire Twitter discourse to erupt out of anything she says. Unfortunately for her, her book is not Twitter.

I don't think this book would've infuriated me quite so much if Oyler hadn't made a name for herself as a snarky, scathing critic of other millennial literature — most famously, Jia Tolentino's superior essay collection, Trick Mirror. That’s not to say you can’t be a great critic if you’ve written a shitty book, but rereading Oyler’s review now, this line in particular echoes with irony: “She primarily uses personal experience to substantiate – rather than ‘get to the bottom of’ – her ideas, though her tendency towards hyperbole has the effect of making them seem entirely subjective.”

Even after trudging through 200 pages to get to the climax of the story, Oyler builds up such suspense for the ~big reveal~ only for it to fall completely flat, having none of the drama she tries to deliver it with. At least on the front of failing to shock, she’s extremely thematically consistent.

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

but i am not nice and i don't like to follow rules. i spend most of my life complaining and i'm certainly not going to stop now.

i do, however, want to stop thinking about this book permanently, so i'll just say this was completely tedious and exhausting and leave it at that.

bottom line: nothing could be more annoying than a pointless book convinced of its own genius.

-------------------
tbr review

i have to read books with low ratings. as part of my quest to be constantly unique

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really funny, really smart, incisive re: modern life, and super weird structurally in ways I can’t wait to talk about - Oyler is incredibly experimental here, giving us parodies of fragmented novels, lots of analysis of our generation's internet habits, literary references from Dickens to Ashbery, a greek chorus of ex-boyfriends, and a lot of direct address. And yet, the central plot, of the lead and her enigmatic bf, Felix, who has a fake account online, is propulsive, full of twists. I read it in a hiccup.

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was fu/king awful. The worst book I've read so far this year.

It's so funny because this book is all the white mediocrity you could imagine piled on top of each other. I threw in the towel at 79%. I was hoping that it was going to get better, but I realized that no, there's just no coming back from this.

The concept was interesting, professional blogger/girl finds her boyfriend's phone, and it turns out that he's like an underground internet shitdisturber conspiracy theorist with a cult following. Then he dies. Then she goes on a mission back to Berlin where they met, sidebar: they're both American btw, but she doesn't go back because that's where they met, no she goes back because she feels.. lonely? confused? bewildered? Not really? As per her conflicted thoughts.

She talks a lot about her experience at the women's march. The boyfriend dies in a way completely unrelated to the conspiracy theory discovery. Which makes the discovery as a plot point lose its power with every further page turned.

You know, this book played out a lot like what I think a lot of country-hopping, Instagram influencer girls lives are like. It was not fun to read. It was exhausting and self-absorbed and white, very white, and very millennial with all its confliction, external posturing, overdone hemming, and hawing about things and their place in the smaller world. The protagonist lying to herself about her contributions to gentrification, her backward views about almost everything and the systems she upholds and benefits from was delusional and an insult to read. It, the protagonist and the book, suffers from trying and failing to be interesting while being fake and noncommittal. This book could not make up its mind about what it wanted to be about. It just wanted to be about whatever it wanted to be about and slide through the gate unchecked.

The crazy thing is that this is about nothing! It’s about the emptiness inside the screen, which is infuriating because only certain people and certain books get to be about fucking nothing. Every other book and every other author has to carry the weight of the world, or at least they have to try to be clever.

Honestly, I'm surprised this got published. It is a bait and switch if I've ever read one and when you've read something so painfully intense and aware and reflective about its place like Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson and then read this, you get fucking mad at what it takes for people to see facts, to see reason, to see reality amidst all the strife and pain and death in the world. Especially when there are people like this nameless character going through self-inflicted nonsense of her own making juxtaposed against people literally trying to survive and enjoy life where it exists for them, with whatever opportunities small or large that is brought their way. It's ridiculous. This entire book is an emperor wears no clothes situation. BBC Culture writers tricked me by putting this book on their best of 2021 (so far) list.

[Ari Levine · Rating 2 out of 5]

A shockingly dull exploration of the parched inner life and raw thought processes of an extremely-online and suffocatingly self-absorbed millennial, who embodies nearly every single cliche about narcissistic Brooklyn and Berlin hipsters working in the fishbowl of digital publishing. Despite her occasional Tweet-length bonbons of witty sociological insight, our first-person protagonist's inner life isn't as complex or fascinating as she (or our author, who is flailing in her attempt at autofiction) thinks it is. Might have worked better as a long short story about pathological lying and self-dramatization on both the Internet and IRL, and the howling madness of living through the first month of the Trump Administration, but not at 272 pages. And, I might add, utterly lacking in moral or political commitment to any cause greater than drunken tweeting or online hookups.

Thanks to Netgalley and Catapult for sharing an ARC of this in exchange for an honest review.

[Sid Nuncius · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m afraid I’d had enough of Fake Accounts after about a third of the book and gave up.

The set-up sounded intriguing: a young woman finds that her partner has secretly been posting to conspiracy theory blogs, which seems entirely alien to who she believes him to be. This leads into an investigation and analysis of how people’s on-line lives and real lives interact, the role of truth and lies in our lives today and so on. This is at the core of much of modern existence and should have been intriguing. In fact what I got was an extremely wordy internal monologue, largely consisting of an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness as the narrator spends hours on-line, falls for her partner, Donald Trump is elected, she eats and buys stuff she probably shouldn’t...and so on. Frankly, after I’d waded through the best part of 100 pages of this (it felt like far more) with no sign of the promised analysis, I lost the will to carry on.

Lauren Oyler writes well, but it’s all so diverse and diffuse that I found very little focus in the narrative. There is the odd pithy remark, like “some people on Twitter seemed to believe every problem could be solved with publicity,” which is neat but hardly a penetrating or original analysis. The publicity blurb tells us that, “Narrated in a voice as seductive as it is subtly subversive, Fake Accounts is a wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity and authenticity in the age of the internet.” I’m afraid I found the voice neither seductive nor subtly subversive and the claim that it’s very funny is funnier than anything in the book itself, which I found flat and tedious.

I’m sorry to be so critical, but I thought this was well-written but an unfocussed mess. I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am I the only person who has seen “Fake Accounts”, by Lauren Oyler popping up everywhere lately?—
—the bright ‘kelly-green’ book cover with a sentence quoted at the top by Zadie Smith —that dares to be read only once?
“THIS NOVEL MADE ME WANT TO RETIRE FROM CONTEMPORARY REALITY, I LOVED IT”....zadie smith

I started this book with my own inner conversation with Zadie Smith....
“ok, Zadie....l’ll contemplate your words, ‘retire from contemporary life’, huh? Have you been on house arrest —due to our pandemic—since March 2020, as I have?”.... ( but, yes, I kinda see Zadie’s point: time spent on the internet and social media ‘is’ our reality — it couldn’t be more clear during our Covid-19 lifestyles).
Still chuckling quietly inside ....hoping I’d love this novel half as much as Zadie Smith....
....a generous surprise gift in the mail, from Catapult Publishing/ thank you.....[this smooth ‘silky&metallic’ feeling book cover really is quite spiffy eye-catching]...
I opened the book for that first peek.
This novel — literally and figuratively starts with BEGINNING.
FIRST SENTENCE:
“Consensus was that the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”.
I thought to myself....”yep, you’re singing to the choir here”....It’s bad enough I have to hear lengthy conversations from my husband about “We are beginning the end of the end”....and now YOU, TOO?”
Ok...
I read on....( just a few more pages I said to myself....doesn’t Lauren Oyler realize I’m reading a 1,071 page novel? The Eight Life”, by Nino
Haratischvili if anyone cares to know. (juicy-saga-epic if you must know more)....
But ok....
I’d read just a few more pages for now (curiosity fun was getting the better part of me)....
But....
It was too late....I was hooked....and read all 265 pages,
MIDDLE....( something happens)
and the last part: ENDING...
in one sitting — barely coming up for air. ( sorry, Nino Haratischvili)

Agree, Zadie...LOVED IT!!! Turns out “FAKE ACCOUNTS” *is*
HEADLINE WORTHY!
If this is a buzz book —I’m ok with that.

It was the ‘contemporary’ irresistible tantalizing voice from the
unnamed narrator that I loved best about FAKE ACCOUNTS....(never ending shameless chatter on every page) .....
I, as the reader, felt like I was her partner in crime side kick. I found it very alluring being inside unnamed’s head.

I swear I was either laughing or giggling inside to myself on every page.

“My skincare regimen is more extensive than I am proud of. I recently learned it was important to let each product ‘fully’ absorb before applying the next, and while I did not spend forty-five minutes each night sitting in the bathroom awaiting transcendence, the layering approach I couldn’t unlearn did give me plenty of time to consider my options.
After a swipe of special water supposedly popular in France, I thought, I won’t do it. After I cleansed a second time, with cleanser, per the recommendation of Korea, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. After I used a dropper designed to look scientific to apply serum to my nose to decrease redness and ‘purify’, I thought, Great social revolutions are impossible without feminine ferment. After a pat of stinging, very expensive foam, the effects of which I was not convinced, I thought, Ha, that’s funny. By the stroke as moisturizer I was dewy and resolved: I had nothing to lose but my chains”.

Yep... ‘noname’ cracked me up!

Moving along ... with more ‘noname’ good times—who was snooping into her boyfriend, Felix’s email account.

“Searching @ THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_
BUGGED_from my own phone, I got a sense for how popular he was: tens of thousands of followers, hundreds of comments on each post, immense gratitude for his being one of the rare few to not only admit the truth but also strive to expose it for the benefit of others. Instead of out rage or hurt feelings I was suddenly, magically free. I wanted the relationship to end. I didn’t want things with Felix to be significantly different, as in better, than they had been for sometime, or for the uneasy not-niceness of our relationship to transform through no effort on my part into copacetic peace, I wanted riddance and finality, a cessation of concern. I may have gruesomely hoped he had been cheating on me, but this was more conclusive:
operating a popular Instagram account that promoted (and maybe devised) conspiracy theories meant he was no mere betrayer of trust or casual manipulator, but rather a person of impossible complexity who’s motivations I was now liberated from trying to untangle”.

Whew!.....
This book is deliciously addictive — equally as much as much of a bag of ‘Beanfields’ nacho bean chips”.
Don’t knock the ‘bean chips’ until you try them: 4 grams of protein- 4 grams of fiber - FULL ON FLAVOR.....( just as the red bag says)

*Noname* knew she wanted to express an alluringly evasive personality
on OkCupid. (a dating app)
In order to determine her personality trait, Noname had to answer some questions—-the purpose was for other users to calculate matches, measured in percentages and compatibility. Noname felt betrayed.
“Percentages! I thought this was supposed to be the wholesome dating app, pure, simple, devised by people like (the real) me, unwilling to rely totally on insipid technology just because it’s there. I wanted to abandon my project and go out drinking, but I had come so far already. I left my computer glowing in the now-dark bedroom and went to the kitchen to get a beer”.
Noname rushed back to her computer— “This was no longer a personal
project, a dalliance with earnest dating-app usage, but a purposeful critique of the system. I could be anyone I wanted (or did not want, as the case may be), and my deception would not be selfish, cruelly manipulative of innocence looking for love, but a rebellion against an entire mode of thinking, which was not really thinking at all, just excepting whatever was advised to you. Dare I say: it was political?
If I ever wrote again, I would write about it. People who took themselves very seriously would get mad at me”.

This book really does question our contemporary realities — our relationship with the Internet age.... our voice, others voice, truth? or dare?— what would ‘you’ do if you uncovered a double life of your boyfriend?
Don’t answer too quickly....

Scary Good!

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts,” an inveterate liar reveals the humiliating truth about our social media age. The deceptive posing, the withering irony, the infinitely cloned political outrage — it’s all splayed out here in this witty novel that captures a certain species of Internet life better than any other book I’ve read. A century ago New York City got Edith Wharton; now the World Wide Web gets Lauren Oyler. We’re even.

The unnamed narrator of “Fake Accounts” is full of intellectual superiority and self-loathing, teetering “on the border between likable and loathsome.” As a White woman in Brooklyn, she refuses to identify as a White woman in Brooklyn because, she says, “the description usually signified someone selfish, lazy, and in possession of superficial understandings of complex topics such as racism and literature” — in other words, someone just like her.

That disarming candor extends throughout the novel, which is delivered in the cool, confidential tone of a narrator who anticipates every charge against her. Each scathing criticism she delivers twists into a mortifying admission. “To be clear,” she tells us at one point, “I know this is boring.” Indeed, the longest section is subtitled: “Nothing Happens.” “Fake Accounts” isn’t just a comedy of manners, it’s a literary snake that. . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

HUH???? More later, maybe.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s invigorating to hate a book this much! I generally don’t find myself reading books I hate, because why would I choose to do that? In this case, I enjoy Lauren Oyler’s criticism, and so assumed I would also enjoy her novel. I also read an excerpt from the first chapter in The Atlantic, and on the basis of that thought this book would be much less shallow than it ultimately was. At the beginning of the book, an unnamed narrator who shares many of Oyler’s identifiable qualities - age, educational background, work history, appearance, Twitter presence, etc. - discovers that her kind of shitty boyfriend Felix is secretly an online conspiracy theorist. But, be warned: there will be no attempt to figure out why he does this - though we’re frequently assured that he couldn’t possibly believe what he posts - or to engage with the phenomenon of conspiracies theories blooming on the internet. We’re also assured that the conspiracies Felix is posting are comparatively anodyne - 9/11 was an inside job, 5G will kill you - and have nothing to do with Trump, even though the book is set right after the 2016 election. This choice lowers the stakes considerably, and makes Felix’s popularity on Instagram less believable.
Soon after the narrator makes this discovery, she’s told Felix has died in an accident. Instead of deciding to investigate this news, or to get to the bottom of his motivations for his weird internet activity, she heads to Berlin, where she and Felix had originally met, and proceeds to waste everyone’s time - hers, the other characters’ in the book, the reader’s - by spending most of the novel going on OK Cupid dates where she assumes a variety of boring, fake personalities. There are no second dates, and no one has sex (though she will sometimes recollect past experiences with Felix). The narrator is incapable of experiencing joy or deep sorrow or caring about anyone else, and withholds any details that would make the reader care about her - she repeatedly vaguely references growing up in a red state (Oyler is from West Virginia) as part of the lower-middle class, she makes one passing mention of going through a period of depression that leaves her unable to get out of bed, she says at one point that she’s been sexually assaulted, but that it doesn’t affect her that much. I’m honestly baffled by how different my reaction to this book was than the fairly ecstatic reviews it’s received and I think that part of it is that it’s been hailed as one of the first true internet books - something I don’t think is accurate, but whatever - and it feels smart to like a bleak book about being on Twitter too much in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon. I’m all for bleak books and unlikable protagonists, but the narrator in this book is both unlikable and fairly dull, and the character of Felix is less than a sketch, with motives that make no sense and an internet life that will feel unbelievable to any reader who is both extremely online and interested in the proliferation of conspiracy theories. I do feel that Oyler captures the feeling of being online, and I enjoyed the parts of the book that vividly describe this, but they could have been an essay.

[Isa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really need a moment to process this book so that I can write a coherent review that isn't so stream-of-conscious-y because then it would kind of make my own thoughts hold less water. Furthermore, I feel like my thoughts on the book are more of a critique of the very jaded dissatisfied American literary novel/genre than of the work itself (there's more to be said on if this is a condition of living under hypercapitalism along with Everything Else, but that's for like...a paper/longform article written by someone smarter than me). I have read too many "true novels of this millenial zeitgeist," which are commentary on social media and the personas we create, etc. etc. and this is not to say I'm bored by the genre, but rather, I think I can only take so much cynicism/self-consciousness/hubris all in one.

Anyway, my own qualms about the writing aside, I found that Oyler wrote an intelligent and oftentimes funny novel that makes a commentary of our being Internet Dwellers and how we construct different identities on social media. What begins as a pseudo-betrayal from an ex-boyfriend turns into a ride through the protagonist's stream of consciousness while she hems and haws and lies her way through situations that turn out to be extremely stressful with very little reward.

The protagonist, unnamed throughout the novel is often exhausting, sometimes even insufferable as we go through her pseudo-Eat, Pray, Love move to Berlin. This would be a moment of finding herself, I suppose, if she didn't seem so condescending towards absolutely everything while simultaneously suffering through it all. However, there are moments of laugh out loud humor where I can (unfortunately) relate. The observations that Oyler brings to light are sometimes very on-point and show how much time she spends Online. Unfortunately, the better moments of the book don't redeem it very much and much like endless scrolling on Twitter, it left me unsatisfied.

Edit: I had such high hopes at 11% of the book because she was still so funny! It was quirky! But man, did that get exhausting.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fake Accounts has an intriguing premise: a young woman snoops on her boyfriend's phone and discovers he has a secret life as a conspiracy theorist on Instagram. Instead of acting on this information immediately she sits on it, biding her time and deciding how best to handle the situation.

Oyler's debut has some timely themes - identity and self in the 2010s/2020s - but these were presented in a way which made the book virtually impenetrable for me. The narrative is written almost entirely as if the reader is in the protagonist's head, and it makes for an incredibly stifling experience. Whilst I found myself relating to many of the thoughts the protagonists has, it was all a bit too realistic and close for comfort at times, and, honestly, doesn't make for scintillating reading. I felt like not insubstantial chunks of these thoughts could have been left out as they didn't further the narrative, and as a result I found my interest waning.

Thank you Netgalley and 4th Estate for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm baffled about what this book was trying to be. It rambles here, there and everywhere. It invests WAY too many pages in talking about nothing in particular. It starts a story and then doesn't really finish it off. It reads like somebody had too many ideas and couldn't be bothered to structure them in a way that would enable the reader to get the point.

The unnamed narrator delivers the whole book in the first person and honestly, there were times that I wondered if this was really fiction or just a really poorly edited memoir. There are moments that made me laugh and had me highlighting quotes, but sadly, they were so few and far between. The book started with an interesting premise - that a girl finds out her seemingly 'normal' pleasant boyfriend is an undercover conspiracy theorist. She's going to dump him but fate gets in the way. I had imagined some interesting experiments that could have been done with his accounts but they didn't come through. We get a fun detour to the post-Inauguration Trump protest rally with all the women in cat hats which I quite enjoyed but I was sick of her Berlin perambulations after the first visit and losing the will to keep going during the second.

There was nothing about the protagonist that made me feel even a tiny connection to her. I didn't understand/sympathise/empathise with any of her actions. I didn't get the point of the book at all. I'm sorry - I wish I could have seen the good in this because I gave it several hours of my attention but I will remember just about nothing about it a week from now. It's shallow and instantly forgettable.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

[Southern Lady Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like a droll character study... Fake Accounts would be perfect for you! I DNFed at 30% - just wasn't my speed. The cover is really cool, though, so I'm keeping it on the shelf for *aesthetics*.

- The story is based around a woman basically going on adventures after she figures out her partner has fake accounts and he's not who she thought he was... I think that's something many of us can relate to in general? Finding out things about people that you thought you knew well?

Other than that... a very short read and would def be good to help your mind wind down before bed.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Debut novelist Lauren Oyler reinforces what we already know: not everything read online is true and how easily anyone can be deceived by false information. “Fake Accounts” (2021) explores the influence of social media and how it shaped the identity of the narrator in her well written book. Lauren Oyler completed her education at Yale University; she is a notable literary critic, essayist, blogger and divides her time between NYC and Berlin.

The unnamed narrator in the story was without question a cultivated, highly intelligent, and unlikeable person. She unapologetically expressed intrigue with herself, while suspicious and mistrustful of others. Felix, her secretive “cagey” boyfriend wasn’t seeing other women as she suspected, but was instead, a conspiracy theorist with thousands of followers. Although she had spent a year and a half with him—he gave nice gifts, sex was good, and he seemed genuinely interested in her. Felix delighted in telling strangers (falsely) that she was a PhD candidate and other made up stories about her.

The Women’s March (2017) was a detailed and exciting event in the storyline. Our strategic narrator planned a carefully constructed break-up with Felix after she returned from the march. Despite her careful planning, things did not evolve as expected: suddenly, without notice, she quit her well-paying job as a content writer for a NYC advertising agency and moved to Berlin .Unable to mourn or grieve her loss of Felix, she reinvented herself posing as a bartender/poet on dating apps, never revealing her real name or a single truth about herself. Initially she had no desire to learn or speak German. Readers also learn a great deal about German culture and customs, detailed travel-like writing of crowded cities including the crumbling Berlin Wall. Although conclusion of the novel was predictable, it was believable, and I was curious about what the twisted and strange protagonist would do next. (3* GOOD) **With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.

[shilpa]

no ❤️

[Matthew Ted · Rating 1 out of 5]

52nd book of 2021.

I'll start by saying that I am probably not the "target audience" of this book. I don't have Instagram, or Twitter, or Snapchat, or whatever else Oyler references in this book, in fact I don't have any of the social media apps on my phone, only the messaging service ones. Social media is a giant waste of time to me and the only benefit is being able to communicate with friends and family from afar. I can think of nothing worse than sitting and watching videos and perpetually scrolling on a phone. So, this "new-wave" "internet age" novel isn't my usual go-to. However, I am attempting to engage more with the contemporary literary world, so I thought I'd try. I've heard some interesting things about this book (interesting meaning bad), so decided to see for myself.

Well, they are all correct. This is a messy, poorly written novel with few redeeming qualities. The voice is apparently "funny", which it isn't, at all, I didn't read anything even resembling humour; there are pathetic similes like The mattress was as thick as a copy of Infinite Jest (interesting that she makes this (poor) reference and then later a character named Orin appears, like Orin Incandenza from Infinite Jest); and despite being a novel about the internet, it brought absolutely nothing new to the conversation: the "profound" moments were things I had heard a thousand times, and things, I believe, most people are self-aware of anyway. I suppose on one level this is embodying all the clichés of a certain generation and being ironic and self-mocking, but I couldn't sit there reading it and think to myself, Ah, this is clever. It didn't come across as clever at all. I felt like I was reading a high-school workshop piece. It read like the juvenile grasping for the profound.

I don't know if this is true but apparently Oyler has a following on Twitter and is quite popular there, so perhaps that helped her in getting this published. She is also a critic and writes for magazines, I believe. Maybe if I was 5+ years younger I would have thought more highly of it, I don't know. As for this being a new-wave novel, I don't think so. I can't imagine this will last. For all its apparent "wit" and irony, it didn't change the fact that I had to read 5 pages about the narrator (essentially Oyler) establishing a dating profile. Or incessant tangents about what some girl's boyfriend did to her. It was like having to listen to the most uninteresting people talk for 300 pages and maybe that's the point of it but it makes for a terrible, dull novel. The whole storyline about the boyfriend being an online conspiracy theorist (a terrible storyline anyway, in my opinion) is dropped pretty quickly and instead we follow the narrator to Berlin as she goes on dates and lies a lot. (And just as well I remember Berlin from my own visit there as Oyler barely bothers to describe the setting around her mind-numbing rambling.) The "twist" isn't a twist either, it was completely predictable and I knew it was coming from about page 100.

This'll probably stay as my worst book of the year. A better (and far shorter) commentary on the falsities and banalities of the modern world is Lou Reed's "New York Telephone Conversation", listen to this instead.

I was sleeping, gently napping when I heard the phone
Who is on the other end talking, am I even home?
Did you see what she did to him, did you hear what they said?
Just a New York conversation rattling in my head
Ooh my, and what shall we wear, ooh my, and who really cares?
Just a New York conversation, gossip all of the time
"Did you hear who did what to whom?", happens all the time
Who has touched and who has dabbled here in the city of shows
Openings, closings, badrap party - everybody knows
Ooh, how sad and why do we call, ooh I'm glad to hear from you all
I am calling, yes I am calling just to speak to you
For I know this night will kill me, if I can't be with you
If I can't be with you

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I looked at my computer so often I felt sick, refreshing Twitter constantly between attempts at reading articles or sending emails. I googled “boyfriend died” and turned up several personal essays …. That I found these unrelatable seemed an indictment of both me and the essays ……….. I could find no example of the normal way to react to the death of your semi-serious boyfriend about whom you felt ambivalent at best even before you realised he was pretending to be a conspiracy theorist online.

Lauren Oyler is perhaps best known as a combative literary critic and for her forthright takedowns of same sacred cows of literature.

As far back as 2014 she wrote a Bookslut review which started “I have always hated Roxane Gay’s writing” – thus taking down the patron saint of Goodreads; another review featured a line by line criticism of (cult reviewer) Ron Charles’s Washington Post’s review of the book.

She has critiqued (not always criticised) the tendency towards auto-fiction, the “spate of recent metafictional novels about writers” and the “hand-wringing that accompanies discussions of the author’s relative place in the real-world hierarchy of power relations” in the fragmentary fiction of Olivia Laing or Jenny Offill, while seemingly admiring Rachel Cusk’s approach of “making her autofictional narrator a supremely judgmental force in her day to day interactions, which is paradoxically, a humanizing quality”

She also had the bravery to critique the Jane Austen of millennial fiction Sally Rooney who “writes in a way that satisfies the literary Goldilocks” and is one of the worst practitioners of the “moral obviousness of most contemporary fiction.” .

Rooney herself once said “I don’t know how I could possibly make literary the time I waste on Facebook. It’s possible that a really good writer could actually make that very interesting. But for me, the endless scroll […] it’s really difficult to elevate that to something beautiful.”

Why do I mention all of this – well firstly because researching things that people have placed online and what it tells you about them seems very much in keeping with the novel.

Secondly because Oyler has written an at least partly auto-fictional novel, one which takes on Rooney’s challenges of how to make the “endless scroll” literary. She has also decided to have a go at writing her own attempt at fragmentary fiction (not it has to be said with the best of intentions) and works in links to various other authors.

The book is set in the first six months of 2017.

Our first person narrator is unnamed – although she (of course) has a Twitter profile picture based exactly on Oyler’s own (although of course only by knowing the author or checking out the author on Twitter would you appreciate this – the profile picture being very different from the shots that have accompanied articles about the book) and similarly (although in different circumstances to the author) spends her (pre lockdown) time between the US and Berlin.

She works as a writer doing online articles on a popular website, and with something of a Twitter following – a job she kind of hates for its vacuity.

The book’s basic premise is that the narrator discovers that her latest boyfriend Felix (her ex-boyfriends functioning as a kind of imagined Greek Chorus and stand-in for the reader allowing the narrator to critique her own actions and thoughts through their eyes) despite his avowed disowning of the social media that consumes her (at one stage she even queries what people who don’t do social media actually use a phone for) has been in fact using his phone to run a cult Instagram account -THIS_ACCOUNT_IS_BUGGED which pedals a range of standard conspiracy theories (Twin Towers etc.), ones she is sure he does not believe but which have attracted considerable followers and interest.

But this is not a book about the Alt-Right but about social media and the conspiracy theory storyline is quickly dropped to the status of a background mystery.

The narrator and Felix met in Berlin, where he was a Tour guide, and while she knew he routinely lied about his past (making something of a game of it) this revelation does not fit anything of what she understood of his character.

She intends to confront him (without having decided how) on her return from the Trump-inauguration Women’s March – only to hear, via his mother, news of his death in a cycle-accident.

Receiving some funds to fly to the family memorial in California she instead quits her job and heads to Berlin where for want of anything else to do (determined neither to work, properly write or to learn the language – the lengthy section itself titled “Middle (Nothing Happens)”) she largely resorts to giving accounts of herself, consistent only in their fakeness, to her employer (as a casual child-minder), flatmate, the authorities (as she applies for residence), various dating apps and a series of men she meets via those apps (in a series of Zodiacally ordered encounters).

The book is, I think, at its best in the early sections where the book not only seeks to make a literary rendition of the “endless scroll” of social media but also I think could be said to emulate a 21st Century Austen more genuinely than Rooney.

Rooney’s characters have a slightly ambiguous and far-from-all-consuming interaction with modern technology and as Oyler herself has commented a bit too much of an emphasis on ensuring equity (see for example how the Marianne Connell power relationship oscillates).

By contrast we have here a narrator fully at home in the online social media world and who in fact sees at best a porous barrier with the offline one. Even more so (like Austen at her best) we have a novel which sets out in detail the rules and power games of social interactions in that world.

Where it really falls apart is in the Zodiacal dating section. This section is written by the narrator as an attempt to imitate a style of female writing she has encountered (and by Oyler as a deliberate takedown of Offill etc).

The narrator talks of “Necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel. Lots of women were writing fragmented books like this now” and remarks “What’s amazing about this structure is that you can just dump any material you have in here and leave it up to the reader to connect it to the rest of the work” while constantly critiquing herself every time her sections stray from the pithy path.

A sentiment shared by the author who has remarked “[I] think for most people, and this is something I learned while I was writing that section, it’s just a really easy way to write. You can sort of self-aggrandize all you want about the arrangement of the fragments, but the arrangement of the fragments doesn’t really matter”.

This section though fails. It is forty pages long and forty pages of a half-hearted and (to be honest) not particularly well done attempt at a style the author thinks is almost meaningless – is funnily enough, forty pages of badly written nothing.

I did however like the surely Cusk-esque tribute of adding a rather random dog story to this section and the Olivia Laing dig of “Why would I want to make my Book like Twitter. If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book, would just spend more time on Twitter.”

I also struggled with the Berlin colour as being rather tedious. At one stage on a rare excursion from her screen into the City the narrator says “Experiencing so much of the world two-dimensionally … made walking [outside] feel like moving through a painting or film” – except I as a reader felt the opposite, the novel is far more alive in the 2-D world of a phone screen and not at all convincing when it tries to add the third IRL dimension.

The book then ends in a Climax with something of a late twist, rendered rather cleverly with the narrator is initially not taken aback by the implications for her of some shock news but instead by the fact that it was such as shock and that somehow Twitter’s algorithm’s had let her down.

Overall this was a fascinating novel by someone really interested in where the novel should go in the 21st Century.

My thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley

I tried constructing hopeful analogies to the past to account for the time I wasted online, to convince myself that my drive to collect useless knowledge about strangers and acquaintances was not a new condition but merely a contemporary manifestation of a timeless problem, but any pre-internet activities I could come up with were in some way valuable: listening to the radio, tending a garden, anything classifiable as a hobby. Maybe before television and the internet people spent more time staring at the walls or ceiling but really just absent. Reading?

[Book Clubbed · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a Millennial, I am contractually required to read and review this book. I didn’t make the rules, so don’t get mad at me, that’s just the way it is. Listen to the review here.

Initially, I found myself agreeing with the protagonist as she skewered everyone online. And this is why many of us come online, right, to see people skewered? What not a modern book to put our habit in a snow globe, one we can break out for the grandkids and tell them how we used to log into our anonymous accounts to call strangers neoliberals?

She has some insightful declarations about Twitter and online communication. However, as someone who is not on Twitter, these had diminishing returns. After the 12th missive about Twitter, I thought: OK, I think I got it. Let’s move on, please.

I even liked the description of her relationship with Felix, at first. She was detached but still craving affection, angry that he often outmaneuvered her to be more detached. It’s a deteriorating relationship, but at least she lets us sift through the rubble in real time.

However, outside of one twist we get in the first half of the book, there is very little plot or scene. Our narrator has no close friends or family, so she has no emotional stakes in play. There is no character change or even pretense that she might change.

I quickly grew sick of being in her head, of her witticisms, of the self-loathing that emerged when she inevitably realized that all she had were witticisms. She is less a fully fleshed character and more an amalgamation of internet tics: memes, political posturing, self-consciously ironic statements, irritating cultural tastes, and obfuscated philosophical beliefs.

The second half is much worse. It features a series of vignettes where she goes on dates and takes on the personality of different astrology signs. Very Millennial and very obnoxious, they are comprised of little riffs that manage to be neither funny nor insightful, like rejected McSweeney’s pieces. Social media dating is ripe with opportunity for humor, but the narrator is too repugnant and too impressed with her pseudo-intellectual observations at this point in the story to draw out any legitimate laughs.

Ultimately, Lauren Oyler too often conflates interest with pure time, assuming that something that uses up so much of her attention (social media) must be worth interrogating. But no, the vacuous remains the vacuous. Internet observations and quirks don’t make a story.

[J. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you to both NetGalley and Catapult for providing me with an early copy of Lauren Oyler’s novel, Fake Accounts, in exchange for an honest review.

I hate giving bad reviews, but Fake Accounts reads like a poorly edited textbook. It was dry, overwritten, and in serious need of an editor. The first chapter seems to ramble on forever. Also, while semi-colons are a criminally underrated and underused punctuation mark, I felt myself longing to see a period. While I have no doubt that the author is a truly gifted writer given her journalistic feats, in applying that style to a work of fiction the discordance is almost palpable.

The premise itself is intriguing and even has potential to be entertaining, had it been executed better. Any quips are easily missed as the reader’s eyes glaze over from the sheer boredom of the protagonist’s overanalytical inner monologue. Stream of consciousness should be buried along with Hemingway.

The book blurb should have tipped me off, but one never knows who is responsible for writing those things. In this case, it was obviously the author. Plus, when a book endorsement stems from an author who is utterly overrated, then I only have myself to blame for requesting a copy.

If you can slog through 84ish pages, that is where the novel “picks up.” I’m all for expanding my vocabulary, but “Antipodean”? Really? Just say, “Australians” or “New Zealanders”, like you did two pages prior. Also, was naming every country in alphabetical order while in line to get a Visa in Berlin really necessary? Did I mistake this for a fiction novel, but in fact it was an essay? What is happening? If you are annoyed by the amount of questions in this paragraph, then buckle-up, because unless the author was trying to reach a minimum word limit this happens for seemingly no reason the entire novel.

At one point, I’m pretty sure a chapter continues on with neurotic confessions and thoughts for over 100 pages. The author even alludes to it in the chapter, claiming it was really only 40, but I am highly doubtful of that fact.

The only redeeming moment for me happens to be in the portion aptly titled, “Middle (Something Happens),” about the D.C. Women’s March. I was shocked to find that not only was this the best part of the novel, a novel that baited its readers with a plot containing a conspiracy theorist, but also that it was probably the closest scene to read like literary fiction and not a personal essay.

Despite my harsh critique, many readers seemed to have enjoyed it. So, if you like the premise, then ignore my review since it appears I am in the minority.

UPDATE: Adding a star because I misread the genre. This is a classic example of literary fiction. Despite the fact that This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite novel and is an example of literary fiction, I guess I prefer general fiction books overall.

[frankie · Rating 3 out of 5]

mindnumbingly boring. like boring to an unbelievable degree

[Jerrie]

Do you ever finally bail on a book and think “Why on earth didn’t I do that sooner?” Well, I just did.

[Michelle Curie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A smart and funny novel full of zeitgeist, that is – in its essence – pointless. It was a mix of the cover and the title that drew me to this. Fake Accounts? Sounds juicy, sounds political, sounds socially engaging. And while it provided all these feelings, it did so in predictable ways.



Fake Accounts has a misleading blurb, too. It claims it's about a woman finding out that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Ultimately this is where we do start off, but it turns out it's just the catapult for a series of more or less mundane events that are to happen in its wake.

It's social commentary that we've probably all have played out in our heads already. We follow our protagonist around as she spontaneously moves to Berlin, without really knowing either people nor the language. She does what many do: explores dating apps. We witness her as she shows behaviour that is entertaining because it's so relatable. It's the little things: Not clicking on WhatsApp messages in order to not show the other person that (of course) you've read the message. Scrolling through feeds wondering what we're hoping to find that we didn't five minutes prior.

"Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn't write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter. You'd be surprised how much time you can spend on Twitter and still have some left over to write a book."

Oyler writes with wit, and that's what made this more pleasant than its story should have allowed. There are loads of little quirks about the way this is structured and told. There's a chorus of ex-boyfriends that comments on everything our protagonist does, you can also never be quite sure whether she's talking to you or if you've just ended up inside her head.

Ultimately, this is more an attempt at capturing a moment in time than a well-rounded presentation of a story. It ensures you'll have a good time, as this is easy to read and not preachy in its implications, but at the same time it's one to forget as quickly as you've read it. Enjoy it while it lasts.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought that this book sounded great. What an intriguing and topical story, the brain washing of your partner by secret online conspiracies. However, I am sorry to say that this was not a very good book. Whole swathes of it are dedicated to navel gazing, recollections of past conversations and musings on what this or that hipster thing means or doesn’t mean, plus long diatribes of trite political observations. None of this pontification is particularly related to the plot. In fact the plot moves painfully slowly. When something does happen it is is usually the main character going somewhere (to a shop, to yoga, to a restaurant, to a different city), then checking her phone, and then very (very) occasionally a major plot point is revealed, after that it’s back to the musing. The language is flowery at best and bizarre (also pretentious) at worst. Sometimes using simpler language is better. For example, ‘protonostalgic fantasies’, ‘The hilarious unlikelihood of our meet-cute...’, ‘straphangers’, the way the email account ‘constantly generated’ (it doesn’t generate emails! It is itself generating? Ugh!). I hate to write negative reviews of books, and I’m so grateful to the publishers and NetGalley for the free copy, but I couldn’t get along with it. If you’re a fan of whiny narrators (just FYI I also didn’t like the much loved Normal People so perhaps I’m the wrong audience) then you will like this. Something nice, I like the cover and I learned what straphangers means.

[Alison · Rating 1 out of 5]

For pete's sake...I rarely write actual reviews, but felt compelled to share my thoughts on Fake Accounts. The plot sounded intriguing and I was thrilled when I saw it was available to borrow through my local cloudLibrary. I should have trusted my gut within the first few pages and bailed out then, instead of trying to ignore the phrase "thesaurus vomit" that kept running through my mind (Expanding my vocab? Great. Suffering through this kind of synonym show off-ery? Hard pass). I finally gave up two-thirds of the way in, which I almost never do.

I don't enjoy giving bad reviews and can usually find something (mostly) redeeming in every book. However in my opinion, Fake Accounts was incredibly dry, overly-wordy and was, quite frankly, rather cringe-y. Imagine 60+ page chapters filled with paragraphs, I mean sentences, like:

"The back three-quarters of her head had the same uniformly beige quality as her face, plus a tattoo of a treble clef behind her ear, pierced several times, but impressed by her savvy I reassessed the blandness as confident, unconcerned, maybe even elevated, indicative of something like the humility of an excellent classical pianist trying to make ends meet in the gig economy, and myself as perhaps a little Polonophobic."

or:

"He had had such a good time, but the timing was that on the pub crawl he usually had an awful time, so predictably bad a time that in fact he had never anticipated ever having anything close to even an OK time, and he certainly had never anticipated having a good time due to the presence of someone who had paid 8 EUR to PARTICIPATE in the pub crawl, the pub crawl which was so bad, the pub crawl put on by a company which owed him actually over 2,000 EUR; he did not envision that the Venn diagram of 'people with whom he might have a really nice time' and 'people who would come to Berlin and decide that the best way to partake of the city's bars would be to pay 8 EUR to have a guy in a polo shirt lead them around Mitte shitholes, some of which only opened for business when they could trick striving companies into paying them to do so' would involve any overlap."

I'm sure this story and this writing style will appeal to many readers, but unfortunately, I am not one of them. Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did!

[CJ Alberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Subversive, incredibly timely, and super smart. There is so much sharp critical thinking in this novel it blew me away. This will not be for everyone, but if you like Lauren Oyler's scathing literary criticism I would give it a shot. So good.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, it was difficult to appreciate the overall “point” of the book because the main character is so completely insufferable. There’s no character growth of any kind and her motivations are often inscrutable. The beginning and end are fairly gripping, but the plot lags in the middle. It became a bit of a slog, but because the book was marketed as a commentary on social media and “woke culture” I felt compelled to finish it. The ending twist was disappointing and left the story feeling unfinished. Did the book say some things about internet culture and political turmoil? Sure. Was it anything original? I’m not so sure. Thanks to Publishers Group West and Ingram for the advance readers’ copy.

[Bianca · Rating 2 out of 5]

No rating as I DNF.
I found the writing flat, there weren't enough elements to keep me interested, so I quit after 1.5 hrs.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quintessential white, young, plugged-in woman moves to Berlin in a faux journey of self-discovery when her ex-boyfriend dies, shortly after she finds out he runs a very successful fake account as a conspiracy theorist.

This was inevitably polarizing, as people who are like this person are going to feel more singled out than able to laugh, and people of colour probably have no time for this kind of satire, even if it is poking fun at the average almost hot-girl 24/7 Twitter user, middle class, performatively educated, who acts really, really white.

For me, I both recognized the narrator as relatable as she was a great lens to critique a lot of unique factors about internet culture and the generations growing up with it. The tone self-mocks and elides in-jokes people who are also plugged-in would recognize, acknowledging how engaging how superficiality is—especially when embodied as a person, such as the narrator, as well as online presence crafted that way—while also providing a pretty on-point, gut-wrenchingly witty and hilarious satire of our cultivated interests with these alternate online personas.

It wouldn’t have worked if the joke wasn’t on her, and by proxy “us”. It’s not too close to home for me and there is a lot of humanity to be found in an acerbic 20-something going through the same identity crisis, code switching, and new difficulties found in a humanity that, post-social media especially, does not actually have that much in common with other generations, and fundamentally function as an almost different species. Only exacerbated by the fact that performativism and schismatic, axiomatic interactions with people also plugged in do nothing to help identify or alleviate these baffling and unique problems to brains on the internet.

To me, it’s worth laughing about, even if it’s really quite sad. We obviously do find it interesting, as a collective, since social media is a inescapable, all-consuming drug—even if we also judge and shun people participating, but failing, in the same competition for social currency. Which, more or less, is ineffectual anyway. It really is a joke. That’s what’s kind of brilliant about this book: It can approximate ourselves, and humanize us, by proxy.

This is casually transgressive of nearly everything. Unconventional in nearly every way, insulting to nearly everyone, but no one more so than the 20 something “liberals” on Twitter, found to be mostly white upper middle class in an echo chamber. There is a literalized greek chorus as her ex boyfriends, meta post modern techniques used to communicate to the reader in multiple layers of the author, who is an author working on a book who wrote articles. The new kind of faux meta fiction trend is, to me, really engaging and fun to read. It’s also really breathless and self referential, such as when she talks about nothing and then mentions how sometimes nothing can be 40 pages long.

Oh, and the most comical description of a blow job I’ve ever read, which had me in stitches for ages. The audiobook only augments the experience. I was flying through pages but hearing the cadence of the prose enlivened them and made them even more funny; I highly recommend it on audio. Just phenomenal. I’ve rarely laughed so much, nodded along, and cared about someone not all that worth caring about, tbh.