[book post] Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

i.

Forty-five years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin dunked on the archetypical Modern Novel Protagonist in her essay, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown." And, I gotta say, Le Guin may as well have called out the protagonist in Lauren Oyler's debut novel by name (emphases mine):

For an example of solidity [in a character in a novel], look at Mrs. Sarah Gamp [from Dickens's Chuzzlewit]. There she is. Everything about her is almost appallingly solid. She represents a definite, established social stratum, though I, an ignorant American, won’t try to specify it exactly. She is English; she is white; she is Christian—at least, she would say she’s Christian. She is a product of urbanization and the Industrial Revolution, but her traditions are much older than that, and you would find her ancestors hanging harpylike about the bedsides of Ovid and Orestes. She is fixed in history, and in custom, and in her own selfopinion. What she wants is a bottle to be placed handy on the mantelpiece, to which she “may place her lips from time to time when so disposed.”

Now what is a modern, 1975 equivalent to Mrs. Gamp? Let me, to avoid odious comparisons, simply invent one. She would be younger than Mrs. Gamp, most likely. She might not bathe any oftener. If she was a Christian, she might be a Jesus freak, but ore probably she would be on some kind of vague occultist trip, or into astrology. She would probably be better clothed, fed, and housed than Mrs. Gamp, and would take for granted some luxuries that Mrs. Gamp had never heard of—automobiles, bottled shampoo, television in the sickroom, penicillin, and so forth. She would, however, have very much less certainty as to her place in society; she might be quite unable to say either who she is or what she wants. She would almost certainly not have a bottle handy. She would have a needle handy. Her addiction would not be funny; as Mrs. Gamp’s, in its outrageous hypocrisy, is. It would be too visibly, drastically disastrous to be funny. She would be too far out of touch with daily reality, too incompetent, even to function as badly as Mrs. Gamp does as a night nurse. And her involvement with criminality would not be, like Mrs. Gamp’s, a desperate grasping at respectability, or at least at the hope of unlimited gin. Her involvement with the criminal and the violent would be passive, helpless, and pointless. Indeed, whenever Mrs. Gamp is most revoltingly indomitable, I see this modern version of her as most passive. It is very hard to loathe her, to laugh at her, or to love her—as we do Mrs. Gamp; or at least Dickens did, and I do. She doesn’t amount to enough. She is a drifter, a pawn, a fragment, jagged bits of a person never annealed, never grown to a whole. Is there enough of her, indeed, to enter a novel as a real character, enough to paint a portrait of? Isn’t she, aren’t we all, too battered, too changed and changeable, too whirled about, future-shocked, relativized, and inconstant, ever to sit still for a painted portrait, ever to stay still long enough that the slow, clumsy art of the novelist can catch up with us?

Psych! We can't call out the protagonist in Fake Accounts by name, because we never learn her name. Which hints at broader problems.

ii.

I picked up Fake Accounts because (1) I found its stated project interesting—what Extremely Online millennial isn't craving a novel that captures the experience of being Extremely Online? And (2), I've found Oyler's literary criticism, while very uneven, reliably interesting.

For instance, here's her take on Jia Tolentio's Trick Mirror, which went so viral it briefly crashed the London Review of Books website. I enjoyed that essay, because God knows I love someone with a damn platform rightfully dunking on moral obviousness in fiction & on the cynical, self-serving brand of pop feminism that manages to be so bizarrely oblivious to the interests of women who don't work high-status white-collar jobs. And I enjoyed it because there's plenty of fun barbs and wry observations. But the overall style and thesis of the essay was disjointed enough that I was vaguely puzzled by the time I finished reading. It's easy to undermine Tolentio's project, sure, but what do you think her project should've been? what precisely was the issue, outside of general complaints of narcissism?

Hence my curiosity about Oyler's debut. The fun thing about a novel is that you, the author, have to stand for something for the novel to work at all (even if it's only a very small something!), and I was desperately curious to know: what do you stand for, Oyler, when you can't hide behind a critique?

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