lauren oyler, 'fake accounts'

[for the Telegraph, 13/2/21]

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Lauren Oyler is suspicious of sincerity. In the literary criticism for which she is renowned, the 30-year-old American attacks those writers, often her peers, who bask in how emotional they are. (She called the essayist Jia Tolentino “hysterical”.) Her debut novel, Fake Accounts, is a portrait of a generation – Oyler’s own – that reads partly as wry and satirical, and partly an intervention attempt.

Our narrator – a millennial in New York – discovers that her boyfriend is an online conspiracy theorist, then that he has mysteriously died. Less emotional than her friends expect, she self-exiles to Berlin, where clichés about “new starts” are replaced by weeks of scrolling the web. Sometimes she goes on dates, under false identities, treating love as an anthropological game. She considers herself “on the border between likeable and loathsome”, not inaccurately.

This novel, like its author, is fixated on literary form. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Oyler once wrote, had the flaw of “unwavering neatness”. Fake Accounts disdains any composure that seems like an act. Our narrator sighs at first-personal, fragmentary books: “This trendy style was melodramatic, insinuating utmost meaning where there was only hollow prose.” She turns her archness into a joke – “Maybe if I wrote like this I would better understand them” – and we get 40 pages about her dating life, in a drily “melodramatic” style.

The point here, for all the humour, is that contemporary novels should loosen up. Forget prose à la Rooney, all poise: our minds have been seared by burnout, and snapped by the internet. Fake Accounts may be free of Emotional Truths, but it is lit with intelligence, and though its self-references can start to cloy – there’s a thin line between smart and too-cute – its fight against cod-sincerity is rare in fiction today. Most novels aim to satisfy us, Oyler says, but is satisfaction what we want?