The unnamed protagonist of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts moves through the plot sneering at everyone she comes across—other feminist women, feminist men, non-feminist men, people who attend demonstrations, her co-workers, her intern (whom she forces to do push ups), people who like baking, people with regional accents, people with children, people who don’t read the news, people who don’t use twitter, people who use twitter, her friends, her boyfriend, her ex boyfriends, other tourists in Berlin, Germans in Berlin, other female authors, “un-admittedly OK writers”, “admittedly OK painters”, and worst of all, her reader (and the list goes on). The novel is a study in smugness.
I try my best not to assume that women’s writing is autobiographical—male authors so rarely have to defend themselves agains this charge. But it’s hard in this case. It’s hard because this book seems entirely un-self-aware—some of the most offensive sentences happen in moments when it’s clear that Oyler thinks her reader will be on-side. This doesn’t feel like a highly developed character, it feels like an extended rant about everything the author does and doesn’t like about the modern world. Even if we assume that it is entirely fictional, and Oyler wants us to despise her narrator, this leaves us with very little reason to keep reading. As far as I can tell, this is a book about two awful people who decide that it suits their image to move to Berlin and mope about the city lying to people. Oh and they use social media a lot, sometimes honestly and sometimes deceptively.
I don’t want to spend too much time writing about this novel, but I would like to include a (brief) list of grievances:
- Oyler spells everything out for her reader, letting us know when she meant something sarcastically by inserting an excruciating “ha ha”.
- At one point in the novel, she resorts to a fragmentary style, intending to mock other successful female authors. But unfortunately this is poor judgement coming from an author who needed about three times more editing down than she got. In Oyler’s prose we get bogged down in details. She criticises her own use of metaphor for us, pausing often to say things like “this is boring, I know” or “a clumsy metaphor, maybe, but I was distressed” which strangely came after one of my favourite uses of language in the whole book—clearly we disagree on some fundamentals.
- The endless mockery of others is intolerable, I almost felt complicit by continuing to read.
- “Donald Trump winning the presidential election gave him [her boyfriend] even firmer grounds for his belief, which I shared, that huge parts of the United States had nothing to do with him” — This sentiment gives me even firmer grounds for my belief, that people who think like this are to blame for a lot of what’s wrong with the world.
- “(My rent being so low that I’m not going to tell you what it was, teetering as I am already on the border between likeable and loathsome)” — We’ll be the judge of that. And we don’t care about your rent. Of course it’s low, you’re gentrifying Berlin.
- [While mocking contemporary fragmentary fiction by women] “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.” Right. Whereas your stylistic choices make for effortless reading?
- While talking to another American expat in Berlin about watching the news and being a feminist: “But she was constantly failing the tests I was setting for her” — Our protagonist here is entirely certain that she has a superior intelligence and moral compass to her interlocutor. We, the reader, are not as convinced.
- The chorus of “ex-boyfriends” whom she imagines piping up with their opinions throughout is mostly annoying, although very briefly shows promise of being an interesting technique. But it doesn’t happen often enough to build up a picture of what these exes were like, and so it means very little to the reader to be informed what her ex-boyfriends would think.
- The twist at the end is difficult to follow, explained as it is suddenly, in the final pages. I was irritated at this final hurdle to be forced to go back and reread several pages to figure out exactly what was happening. It felt like it was supposed to be very clever, but I never got to the bottom of exactly why.
I could go on, but I’ve made my point.
Fake Accounts came out in the same month as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (an unfortunately forgettable title), and they both deal with the impact of social media addiction on young women in today’s world. While Lockwood’s writing would almost certainly elicit a mean-girl eye-roll from Oyler, only one of these novels is innovative, insightful, and fresh. And I know which book I enjoyed more.
[February 2021]
t-barnes 