Scan barcode
kelseyland's review
dark
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
All I want to do right now is read books about shitty people doing outrageous things so this one definitely fit the bill. Reminded me a lot of Elif Batuman's The Idiot even before I got to the shoutout so that was great, too. I simply could not stop reading this book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny, Toxic relationship, Infidelity, Grief, and Death
bookish_sabrina's review
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This is a deeply insular and meta novel about a women with a boatload of white privilege who learns that her boyfriend runs a popular white supremacist Instagram account. This does not compute with her understanding of him as a person, who is himself generally against social media and quite liberal. However, he also definitely seems like a fuckboy that the unnamed protagonist says with out of convenience and laziness more than anything else.
The book takes quite a turn when her boyfriend dies in a bicycle accident before she is able to dump him for good while she is at the Women's March in January 2016. This leads to her going to Berlin, where she spends about two-thirds of the novel.
She doesn't have great motivations for dropping everything and moving to Berlin. She justifies needing to process her feelings and discover herself, but she seems pretty uncommitted to doing the actual emotional labor of getting there.
This book is characterized by millennial ennui. Oyler channels the more disgusting and depressing factors of being a millennial who grew up on the internet. Oyler tows an impressive line of letting us know that she is in on the critique while the protagonist, who is herself writing this novel, is not. It really demonstrates the wishy-washy fatalism embodied by a lot of white millennials. This feeling is characterized exceptionally well in the line:
"...the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population's quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don't want to die, but we also don't want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense: the end of the world would let us have our cake, and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unreachable due to our collapse" (p. 6).
It is an excellent critique on performance. Being on social media is inherently performative, and also a place where we are forced to care about how we are performing in terms of likes and comments. This novel is also all about performance, as the protagonist is clearly trying to show us how smart and articulate she is about modern topics, while also putting on various performances for all of the people in her real life. This is especially well-embodied by the section where she goes on several Tinder dates while embodying the characteristics of different astrological signs on each one, which is perhaps the most millennial thing to have ever millennialed. Other very millennial moments: cycling through the same 3 social media tabs, talking about a skincare routine, hyping one's own search engine prowess, the incredible tension built up around the protagonist looking at her boyfriend's phone while he's sleeping, and lots of meditating on social media usage and its myriad of potential consequences, yet refusing to quit.
I didn't care for the ending, which left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. It was one of those things where there either needed to be more or none at all. But I found this book challenging and funny. The prose felt dense, full of insights into modern life. Not sure how well this book will age because it is so incredibly "now," but I feel it does really encapsulate what it feels like to be alive right now. Maybe that will be useful or interesting to observe for readers a few years down the line.
Opening line: "Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media."
The book takes quite a turn when
She doesn't have great motivations for dropping everything and moving to Berlin. She justifies needing to process her feelings and discover herself, but she seems pretty uncommitted to doing the actual emotional labor of getting there.
This book is characterized by millennial ennui. Oyler channels the more disgusting and depressing factors of being a millennial who grew up on the internet. Oyler tows an impressive line of letting us know that she is in on the critique while the protagonist, who is herself writing this novel, is not. It really demonstrates the wishy-washy fatalism embodied by a lot of white millennials. This feeling is characterized exceptionally well in the line:
"...the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population's quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don't want to die, but we also don't want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense: the end of the world would let us have our cake, and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unreachable due to our collapse" (p. 6).
It is an excellent critique on performance. Being on social media is inherently performative, and also a place where we are forced to care about how we are performing in terms of likes and comments. This novel is also all about performance, as the protagonist is clearly trying to show us how smart and articulate she is about modern topics, while also putting on various performances for all of the people in her real life. This is especially well-embodied by the section where she goes on several Tinder dates while embodying the characteristics of different astrological signs on each one, which is perhaps the most millennial thing to have ever millennialed. Other very millennial moments: cycling through the same 3 social media tabs, talking about a skincare routine, hyping one's own search engine prowess, the incredible tension built up around the protagonist looking at her boyfriend's phone while he's sleeping, and lots of meditating on social media usage and its myriad of potential consequences, yet refusing to quit.
I didn't care for the ending, which left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. It was one of those things where there either needed to be more or none at all. But I found this book challenging and funny. The prose felt dense, full of insights into modern life. Not sure how well this book will age because it is so incredibly "now," but I feel it does really encapsulate what it feels like to be alive right now. Maybe that will be useful or interesting to observe for readers a few years down the line.
Opening line: "Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Grief, and Sexual content
More...