The online world has made us strange creatures. With the proliferation of social media, we’ve become accustomed to taking on different personas and crafting an identity that could, potentially, be completely different from the one we have in the real world. This is, of course, no surprise to anyone that has seen what Facebook – sorry, “Meta” – has done to social discourse. There’s more agency on the web – we can be whatever we want to be.
Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts hinges on this question, specifically to target what it means to intentionally lie about something on a web profile. The protagonist (does she have a name?) discovers her boyfriend, Felix, runs a conspiracy theory page on Instagram and starts contemplating why he would even try to create that persona. Even as she comes up with an answer that she thinks makes sense, there’s never any confirmation that she is empirically correct.
Not that she particularly leads us astray either. Oyler’s novel is content to have us trust her narrator to be telling the truth about the events in her life and nothing happens that frighteningly reveals that she had been lying to us the whole time. For the most part, we can trust our narrator. What does such trust even mean though? Why do we depend on her and her repeated assertions that she has numerous friends, even as she only ever names two of them? What is her family history? Who, essentially, is she?
The voice she brings is sardonic and witty, lending a punch to the narration of events that is, for the most part, extremely mundane. Very few incidents make up the overall plotline, which sees our heroine travel to Berlin and create an online dating profile after she ends things with Felix. Instead, we’re drawn in to the stories she tells and the lies she parcels out to people who may or may not actually want to get to know her. As she rightly notes, they may just be after her for sex. The games she play with men give fascinating insights into what people are willing to accept and communicate over the internet, highlighting how easy it is for lies to become accepted truths. She’s even able to lie her way into a German visa.
That is, of course, until the final 30 pages, when something truly bizarre occurs and reshapes the reader’s relationship with the triviality of lying and obscuring our online presence from the people we share space with. While the whole preceding novel has shown how little consequence there can be to lying about to people, it suddenly becomes shockingly focused on how our online personas extend beyond the limits which we intend for them to reach. How our words penetrate, bruise, and reach others who we have no idea are listening in.
If I’m being honest, I did have a hard time picking my way through the book’s rather slow opening pages. The coldness the narrator exhibits towards anything in her life initially edges her close to the side of apathetic, such that you wonder why she can’t bring herself to break up with Felix, even after she decides that she wants to. Her frostiness becomes far more scrutable as she attends the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration, unpacking the conflicting politics of an event that highlighted a certain white female privilege, even as it attempted to fight against sexism.
A book I found myself thinking a lot of throughout my reading here was Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, which, coincidentally, receives a mention in the book itself. The two are after different things, but unpack the strangeness of feeling unmoored from yourself, especially as an American abroad. Both books feature narrators have trouble speaking the language of the country they shack up in, one because he’s afraid to admit he can and the other because she simply couldn’t give a shit, and have relatively limited experiences with locals. Oyler’s novel tends much more on the side of caustic asides and critical observations than Lerner’s, but both are curious about our relationships with ourselves in the context of a society that may or may not care about our development.
Indeed, the word that I think best describes this book is “unbothered.” The social world we’re in tolerates everything, the protagonist handles everything that comes her way (even when she’d prefer not to), and nothing seems to have a lasting impact on anything. There’s a solidity to this position and a sureness, but there’s also an aching vulnerability to it. Fake Accounts hits that note with incredible aplomb, especially in its closing pages. I’m excited to see Oyler’s biting wit rear its head again.
Thank you, Fake Accounts.
The Z-Files 