She meets Felix in Berlin, where he’s a pub-crawl tour guide. There isn’t much work happening in Fake Accounts. This provides Seinfeldian laughs - about the trauma of an animated ellipsis that never resolves itself into a message, about the horror of seeing one’s texts, robbed of inflection or charm, on someone else’s phone - as well as a painful reminder of the absurdity to which we’ve submitted. Instead of relying on our shared, exhaustive, and exhausting knowledge, Oyler describes soon-to-be-superseded technologies and practices in meticulous, anthropological detail. Of course, the hands in Fake Accounts do look busy, scrolling, swiping, tapping, texting. Read as a satire of modern life and mores, Fake Accounts suggests a pretty old-fashioned “take”: Idle hands are the devil’s playthings. “I was overtaken by a sense of purpose,” she writes, “unlike anything I could recreate in a workplace environment.” Oyler’s narrator learns about Felix, for instance, by snooping in his phone, arguably a less abstract, more personal violation of trust than Felix’s nerdy hobby, though it may be bad manners to note that the righteous are always more concerned with humanity than with individuals. Mostly yes, both because Oyler is such an observant commentator and talented prose stylist and because Fake Accounts, for all its fixation on internet culture, is interested in IRL relationships.
So, if Felix initially makes for an anemic antagonist, does this book still land? Oyler, who scoffed in an interview at the idea that the Trump era posed special challenges to fiction or interpretation, ought to understand that. The truth can be misread, art can inflame, claims or ideas we wouldn’t dream of removing from circulation have been more detrimental in their application than “chemtrails” or “Illuminati sex dungeons” could ever hope to be. Having fun at the expense of Americans’ stupidity, as Felix does, is as American as Mark Twain, P.T. In part: “The moral obviousness of most contemporary has been a boon for these writers, who tend to find simple things complicated and complicated things simple.” The simple thing that Oyler’s premise requires us to find complicated is this: The imperative to protect people from their own gullibility is hardly self-evident. One of Oyler’s most quotable passages appears in her review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. warned of radio-frequency devices planted in the flora of every country on earth. That this is treated as such an earth-shaking discovery, closer to the “child pornography” than “nerdy hobby” end of the spectrum, may be less puzzling in the wake of the QAnon-fueled Capitol raid, but what little we see of Felix’s content seems squarely in the joke or satire category (“his most recent picture.
Our narrator, a confidently transparent stand-in for Oyler’s critical voice and for the international travel parts of her biography, learns that her boyfriend, Felix, secretly operates a popular conspiracy meme Instagram account. In the former context, the “fake accounts” are anons, sock puppets, bots, and sowers of misinformation in the latter, they are the “fake accounts” we give of ourselves in order to live, or something. Now Oyler is being borne aloft for her debut novel, Fake Accounts, and the fanfare carries a whiff of apotropaic magic, like calling the Furies “the Kindly Ones” to appease them or escape their notice.įake Accounts is, as its ingenious title suggests, both about the “extremely online” and about deception in personal relationships.
“I’d like to see you try writing a book” is the moron’s challenge to an exacting critic.