![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
[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):
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?
iii.
...the answer, as best as I could decipher, was, "not much."
All the barbs and dry humor that permeate Oyler's standard criticism are here. Which is fun at essay-length, but at novel-length, it's numbing to read: her friends buy fifteen-dollar cocktails while denouncing capitalism; some chick in her yoga class says something clueless about Feminism TM; a dude drones on all-too-seriously about Relationship Anarchy; on and on and on, we got the point already where's the fucking story, all while our narrator is just so Cool and Detached and Above It All.
Speaking of our narrator, our modern Ms. Gamp: the novel is told in first-person, and it turns out the unnamed narrator's headspace is an absolutely claustrophobic place to be. The problem isn't that the narrator is unlikable, even though she is (she's a self-absorbed amoral white girl Brooklynite, whose sole redeeming feature is, well, at least she's disinclined to play the victim, while she's strategizing over how to appear morally righteous and cheating on boyfriends and so on—which could be great fun, if she didn't seem somehow above that, too). The problem is more that she's opaque—so obsessed with how her boyfriend perceives her, or how her readers perceive her, or how her ex-boyfriends perceive her, or how her yoga classmates perceive her, that she's constantly telling people what she thinks they wants to hear, and perceiving dumbassery and naïveté in even her most banal interactions—not in a intriguing unreliable-narrator way, but in a desperate-for-more-Twitter-followers way. Every relationship in her entire life seems to be transactional, in a way that beggars belief, or suggests scoiopathy. If it's the latter, well, sociopathy's never been so boring. A book in the head of a narcissistic sociopath could be great fun if they were doing something interesting, if they wanted something, or at least had interesting impulses to act on. Yet despite her making some surface-level interesting choices (moving to Berlin on a whim, making up bullshit on dating apps), she somehow seems to hold all these choices at a remove—ends up being "passive, helpless, and pointless," as Le Guin would say.
iv.
There were hooks of interesting ideas here. At the risk of being all "why didn't Oyler write a totally different kind of novel," here's the bits that intrigued me:
* The opening, naturally. The premise for this novel is pretty fun: a late 20's Brooklynite snoops through her boyfriend's phone and discovers he's got an Instagram account full of conspiracy theories. I thought, initially, this would lead some meditation on the general theme of "you never really know somebody"—rich soil for a story, for sure. Instead, the narration insists—loudly and repeatedly, in a way that suggests authorial intent—that Felix is not that kind of guy, that he definitely cannot actually believe these conspiracy theories, and whatever reason he has for doing this, the answer is not "because he actually believes it." Besides sucking all the fun out of what could've been a delightful source of speculation, the narrator does not even bother speculating herself. Is it an art project? a joke that got out of hand? a weird addiction? Refusing to give a clear answer to this question is respectable, but refusing to even ponder it is maddening; why give us such a rich, fun thing to think about, only to barely mention it at all for the next two hundred pages? Instead we are regaled with the details of how one fills out German health insurance forms. Yawn.
* I was struck by how the narrator decides to go to the women's march, not because she really wants to, but because she feels peer-pressured by the women in her yoga class. She tells her boyfriend she's going, and he says that's good, and she says yeah, and that's the whole exchange. God, what's the point of a boyfriend if you can't tell them how you really feel, if you can't say "look I'm having to do this thing for social image reasons, and it's probably gonna suck, I'm not into it, but yeah I'll see you when I get back Sunday"? It struck me as such a sad moment, that she's so obsessed with how she's perceived that she can't even be honest with her boyfriend of over a year—and while the whole rest of the book is filled with the narrator lying wildly for all sorts of image reasons, it never really goes anywhere with the theme, and doesn't have any visible interesting effects on our narrator's psyche. Again, what a waste.
v.
While reading, I occasionally wondered if I was reading the first act of Sarah Miller's autobiographical essay, "The Movie Assassin". The first two acts of that essay, I guess; the part where she's paid an awful lot to write the most absolutely stupid shit and be another vapid New York writer.
What would that essay be, if it just stopped in the middle? Bad, probably. Oyler might call the full essay moralizing, though, too tidy with too obvious an ending. Well, maybe. But at least it's a fucking ending. (Oh right, Fake Accounts tries a twist ending, but it's not much of a twist, and not much is done with it; it's little more than excuse for some kind of signpost to end the endless exhausting monologue.)
vi.
I'm also reminded of a principle in the board game Diplomacy, which holds generally in all games involving deception: the person who is talking the most is usually hiding something.
Which is a fun experience in Diplomacy because there's always a map, and the map is what's real. You can compare what the troop positions imply against the guy who swears he's totally absolutely not going to screw you, and infer for yourself what it all means.
But in Fake Accounts, we don't get a map. We get the inside of the narrator's head, this claustrophobic place where the narrator talks and talks and talks and never says a damn thing.
vii.
If I had to guess what the narrator of Fake Accounts really wants (a hazardous thing to venture, given how hard the narrator seems to rebuff the very idea of wanting), it's probably that she wants someone to really see her. She wants someone to call her on her bullshit, in one of these fake dates she goes on. She wants someone to cut through all the bullshit of modern life and really try to understand.
But for me to fully believe that, there's got to be something there. Someone that the narrator's trying to be, wants to be, is without knowing it.
And furthermore, I dunno, she has to at least try to do the same? try to call someone else out? Or try and fail, if you want to make it a tragedy? Or willfully choose not to try, if you wanna go full gleeful nihilism? Anything but this vaguely detached coolness.
You could call the result post-nihilism, I guess. Too oblivious to meaning to even actively reject it. And I don't much like it.
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?
iii.
...the answer, as best as I could decipher, was, "not much."
All the barbs and dry humor that permeate Oyler's standard criticism are here. Which is fun at essay-length, but at novel-length, it's numbing to read: her friends buy fifteen-dollar cocktails while denouncing capitalism; some chick in her yoga class says something clueless about Feminism TM; a dude drones on all-too-seriously about Relationship Anarchy; on and on and on, we got the point already where's the fucking story, all while our narrator is just so Cool and Detached and Above It All.
Speaking of our narrator, our modern Ms. Gamp: the novel is told in first-person, and it turns out the unnamed narrator's headspace is an absolutely claustrophobic place to be. The problem isn't that the narrator is unlikable, even though she is (she's a self-absorbed amoral white girl Brooklynite, whose sole redeeming feature is, well, at least she's disinclined to play the victim, while she's strategizing over how to appear morally righteous and cheating on boyfriends and so on—which could be great fun, if she didn't seem somehow above that, too). The problem is more that she's opaque—so obsessed with how her boyfriend perceives her, or how her readers perceive her, or how her ex-boyfriends perceive her, or how her yoga classmates perceive her, that she's constantly telling people what she thinks they wants to hear, and perceiving dumbassery and naïveté in even her most banal interactions—not in a intriguing unreliable-narrator way, but in a desperate-for-more-Twitter-followers way. Every relationship in her entire life seems to be transactional, in a way that beggars belief, or suggests scoiopathy. If it's the latter, well, sociopathy's never been so boring. A book in the head of a narcissistic sociopath could be great fun if they were doing something interesting, if they wanted something, or at least had interesting impulses to act on. Yet despite her making some surface-level interesting choices (moving to Berlin on a whim, making up bullshit on dating apps), she somehow seems to hold all these choices at a remove—ends up being "passive, helpless, and pointless," as Le Guin would say.
iv.
There were hooks of interesting ideas here. At the risk of being all "why didn't Oyler write a totally different kind of novel," here's the bits that intrigued me:
* The opening, naturally. The premise for this novel is pretty fun: a late 20's Brooklynite snoops through her boyfriend's phone and discovers he's got an Instagram account full of conspiracy theories. I thought, initially, this would lead some meditation on the general theme of "you never really know somebody"—rich soil for a story, for sure. Instead, the narration insists—loudly and repeatedly, in a way that suggests authorial intent—that Felix is not that kind of guy, that he definitely cannot actually believe these conspiracy theories, and whatever reason he has for doing this, the answer is not "because he actually believes it." Besides sucking all the fun out of what could've been a delightful source of speculation, the narrator does not even bother speculating herself. Is it an art project? a joke that got out of hand? a weird addiction? Refusing to give a clear answer to this question is respectable, but refusing to even ponder it is maddening; why give us such a rich, fun thing to think about, only to barely mention it at all for the next two hundred pages? Instead we are regaled with the details of how one fills out German health insurance forms. Yawn.
* I was struck by how the narrator decides to go to the women's march, not because she really wants to, but because she feels peer-pressured by the women in her yoga class. She tells her boyfriend she's going, and he says that's good, and she says yeah, and that's the whole exchange. God, what's the point of a boyfriend if you can't tell them how you really feel, if you can't say "look I'm having to do this thing for social image reasons, and it's probably gonna suck, I'm not into it, but yeah I'll see you when I get back Sunday"? It struck me as such a sad moment, that she's so obsessed with how she's perceived that she can't even be honest with her boyfriend of over a year—and while the whole rest of the book is filled with the narrator lying wildly for all sorts of image reasons, it never really goes anywhere with the theme, and doesn't have any visible interesting effects on our narrator's psyche. Again, what a waste.
v.
While reading, I occasionally wondered if I was reading the first act of Sarah Miller's autobiographical essay, "The Movie Assassin". The first two acts of that essay, I guess; the part where she's paid an awful lot to write the most absolutely stupid shit and be another vapid New York writer.
What would that essay be, if it just stopped in the middle? Bad, probably. Oyler might call the full essay moralizing, though, too tidy with too obvious an ending. Well, maybe. But at least it's a fucking ending. (Oh right, Fake Accounts tries a twist ending, but it's not much of a twist, and not much is done with it; it's little more than excuse for some kind of signpost to end the endless exhausting monologue.)
vi.
I'm also reminded of a principle in the board game Diplomacy, which holds generally in all games involving deception: the person who is talking the most is usually hiding something.
Which is a fun experience in Diplomacy because there's always a map, and the map is what's real. You can compare what the troop positions imply against the guy who swears he's totally absolutely not going to screw you, and infer for yourself what it all means.
But in Fake Accounts, we don't get a map. We get the inside of the narrator's head, this claustrophobic place where the narrator talks and talks and talks and never says a damn thing.
vii.
If I had to guess what the narrator of Fake Accounts really wants (a hazardous thing to venture, given how hard the narrator seems to rebuff the very idea of wanting), it's probably that she wants someone to really see her. She wants someone to call her on her bullshit, in one of these fake dates she goes on. She wants someone to cut through all the bullshit of modern life and really try to understand.
But for me to fully believe that, there's got to be something there. Someone that the narrator's trying to be, wants to be, is without knowing it.
And furthermore, I dunno, she has to at least try to do the same? try to call someone else out? Or try and fail, if you want to make it a tragedy? Or willfully choose not to try, if you wanna go full gleeful nihilism? Anything but this vaguely detached coolness.
You could call the result post-nihilism, I guess. Too oblivious to meaning to even actively reject it. And I don't much like it.