Auto-Meta, or Your Brain on the Internet: A Review of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts
Fake Accounts
By Lauren Oyler
February 2021
Catapult Books
ISBN: 978-1948226929
272 pages
Reviewed by Chris Drangle
To risk stating the depressingly obvious: the internet has not transformed daily life in quite the way we hoped it might. Dreams of happy social communion brought about by widespread access to the information superhighway can now be seen, in this year of our lord 2021, rotting like roadkill on the shoulder. Whatever else the freedom of semi-anonymized digital space has revealed about humanity, it has confirmed our boundless appetite for vacuous busyness—for entertainment streams of incredible speed and dubious utility—while underscoring our energetic inclination to troll each other for any and no reason. The intersection of these modes is alarming. As we fill our hours with passive scrolls through social media, we stand in the crosshairs of others whose agendas may not be so benign, whose identities are concealed, whose goals are inscrutable.
The unnamed narrator of Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, is both keenly aware of this contorted dynamic and seemingly powerless against it. She is a twenty-something culture blogger in New York, and at the outset of the story discovers that her boyfriend, Felix, about whom she feels fairly meh, secretly maintains a set of social media accounts dedicated to misinformation. She is shocked, but also weirdly relieved:
I may have gruesomely hoped he might be 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 whose motivations I was now liberated from trying to untangle.
That final clause is somewhat of a red herring, as the enigma of “true” identity will recur throughout the novel. But curiously—or with a certain knowing perversity, I might say—the narrative does indeed turn its attention away from the practical matter of its inciting incident. An unexpected plot turn at the quarter mark inspires the narrator to move to Berlin, where she will spend the rest of the book checking her emails, worrying about visa applications, and scrolling Twitter. She embarks on a dating picaresque wherein she mulls the mutability of persona by inventing different backstories for herself and impersonating different astrological signs, and she takes some walks and does some babysitting, but Oyler’s plot feels less like a causal chain of escalating events than a droll concession to the convention that things must “happen” in a novel. Section titles like “BACKSTORY” and “MIDDLE (Something Happens)” and “MIDDLE (Nothing Happens)” cheekily acknowledge structural formalities even as our narrator remains mired in self-aware stasis:
Because it was a little after 6 a.m. on a Friday in the U.S., nothing worthwhile was happening on social media; I scrolled through my feeds distractedly, opening and closing the same site multiple times in quick succession. I was a lab rat assigned to a random trial with the lowest frequency of reward. I knew that, and more importantly I knew it was an unoriginal observation, yet I couldn’t stop myself from making it.
Here, and throughout the book, there is something both funny and tortured about the self-consciousness of this character. Despite the casual tone, and frequent digressions into the kind of culture writing that she presumably creates at her day job (many of these sidebars are hilarious, targeting everything from male feminists to smartphone design to white women doing yoga in Brooklyn), there is a river of anxiety flowing through the white space, what I eventually came to see as an emergent helplessness in the repeated reflexive pivots into the cool perspective of the cultural observer. On her way to attend the Women’s March of 2017, she reflects,
In the weeks since Trump had been elected there had been a quick proliferation of vocabulary among people I had assumed to be basically apolitical […] It was as if everyone had taken introduction to political philosophy and wanted to impress the hot professor, who had grown up in the Soviet Union. If everyone in the world could take introduction to political philosophy I’m medium-certain we would have been in a better situation than we were, but as it was the language felt wrong, ripped from the past and pasted on the present, its rough edges visible and curling, though I couldn’t find a way to pin down getting educated as a bad thing.
The tacit admission that she is looking for a way to pin down “getting educated” as “a bad thing” is part of the humor here, but there is also a note of loneliness in the pre-emptive cynicism. This woman knows that, for all of her privilege, she lives in a world that runs on exploitation, and her archness sometimes seems like a way to avoid feeling powerless. For me, much of the novel’s poignance comes from this sense of buried desperation.
Back on the discernible surface, the streak of self-deprecating self-commentary occasionally struck me as a splitting of the difference between meta- and autofictional modes. Oyler’s narrator is an aspiring novelist who directly addresses the reader (“The story of how [Felix and I] met is funny, enough that it may help answer one of the questions you probably have so far: Why was I with him?”), is conscious of and anxious about the text we are reading (“Fuck! I messed up the structure”), and whose Twitter profile picture is a conspicuous match for Oyler’s own (“in which my hair completely covers my eyes and nose”). As it would have to be, the book is onto itself; see the passing reference to a literary podcast our narrator listens to: “As I crossed Kottbusser Damm to assess a bakery’s offerings the author laughed about how irritating it was to be asked to what extent her novels derived from her life, without saying to what extent her novels derived from her life.” This playful commingling of narrative positions—a clear blurring of the lines between author, implied author, and narrator—is a productive echo of the book’s concern about the sheer difficulty of “getting to know” someone, including oneself. People are nesting dolls of mystery, even without the added complications of online masquerade. Auto-meta: this is your brain on the internet.
And if character itself might be nothing more than a fake account, Fake Accounts also suggests the inadequacy of pro forma narrative arcs as a means of resolving the issue. As mentioned above, the novel is not overly interested in the manufacture of rising action, and rarely elects to use its narrative circumstances to create tension beyond the momentary and internal. Third-act worries about a trip to the visa office at first seem to be telegraphing an upcoming conflict, but the resolution of that arc is as banal as the office it occurs in and requires almost no effort from our protagonist—another occasion for virtuosic anxiety that never develops into a dilemma that would require her to act, or even to make a decision. My guess is that readers will get varying mileage from this storytelling approach. Some will be haunted by the depiction of a modern existence that, even when relatively free from external conflict, offers little in the way of internal comfort. Others may feel a boorish desire for more cause-and-effect, for events and consequences that beget each other, or for clearer stakes to undergird the in-depth descriptions of dating app user interfaces.
For this reader, the novel’s most dependable asset is Oyler’s prose. Every sentence offers something—unexpected adjectives, intricate syntax in service of mordant observation, semantic rollercoaster loops around pop culture and through acute ennui. She even makes punctuation fun. And while the sustained attention to the minutiae of the internet experience did, for me, result in diminishing returns, I admired the high-wire performance of this narrator, a character whose self-awareness never quite turns into agency, whose voice is somehow both inveterately arch and disarmingly sincere. Just like people on the internet. God bless them, the poor bastards.
Lauren Oyler’s (@laurenoyler) essays on books and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Cut, The New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.
Chris Drangle (@ChrisDrangle) has taught creative writing in New Orleans, Central New York, the Bay Area, and Kazakhstan. His fiction has been recognized with a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Jentel Arts Residency. Before earning an MFA at Cornell University, he worked as a car washer, a radio DJ, a legal assistant, and the guy who drives the caged golf cart at the driving range. He lives in Athens, Georgia.