A young woman grapples with selfhood in the social media age in the combative American critic’s sharp debut novel
A danger for the debut novelist who makes her name writing combative book reviews is that, when it’s time to step into the arena, her targets’ friends, fans and flatterers will line up to throw rocks. Lauren Oyler, a critically active young American, comes bearing a reputation for shanking celebrated millennials in the likes of the New Yorker, LRB and Guardian. Her antipathy towards the “moral obviousness of most contemporary fiction” – a consistent pulse in her essays and reviews – seemed promising with regard to the fiction she was gearing up to produce. Rumours that her novel concerned a young woman’s relationship with a man from the wrong side of the internet led me, wishfully, to envision a foray into online cultures usually shadow banned from fiction’s ideologically monochromatic mainstream.
Fake Accounts is not that book (closer to it would be Hari Kunzru’s superb Red Pill). What it is, instead, is an unexpectedly playful portrait of a spiky, sceptical young woman grappling with questions of selfhood, narcissism and duplicity in the social media imperium. The seemingly Oyler-like narrator – more on her in a moment – does fall for a guy who, she discovers, secretly maintains a popular Instagram account pushing inane conspiracy theories. But that’s as far as it goes in terms of behind-enemy-lines internet incursions. The boyfriend’s second life is a MacGuffin that allows Oyler’s narrator to expatiate on her true theme: the amount of time she spends on her phone, and how bad this makes her feel.
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