A review by jonathanelias
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Did not finish book.

Stilistisch frisch, zeitgemäß. Story plätscherte etwas vor sich hin, auf letztem Viertel ausgestiegen.  

Goodreads not amused😄: 

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, 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 Tolentinos superior essay collection, Trick Mirror. That's not to say you cant 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."