Fake Accounts Paperback – January 18, 2022

I picked this up because I am a genuine fan of Oyler's critical prose—which is smart, funny, has an elegant way with metaphor, and is sometimes cuttingly mean in a (perhaps sometimes unintentionally) self-revealing way.This novel is comparatively disappointing. The narrator is just introspective enough to know that she is spectacularly self-involved, but her capacity for self-awareness ends there, which means she is pretty intolerable.Don't get me wrong—I don't generally care if a character in a novel is "unlikeable." That's a silly complaint—plenty of great fiction has been written from the perspectives of a truly awful people, and sometimes the awfulness is very much the point. (Iago is the most interesting person in "Othello," after all.)The problem is that I am not quite sure if Oyler is herself fully aware of how her character comes across, or what she's trying to achieve artistically by focusing on this protagonist. Does she hope we will find this person sympathetic — moving in her moments of depression, intriguing and witty in her observations about contemporary culture? Or did Oyler want us to see her mostly as an entitled, solipsistic, somewhat narrowly experienced millennial type—one who is neither as smart as she seems to think she is, nor particularly interesting even in her flaws? And if the latter, then ... why?Because it's not that the character is awful, really, so much that she is ... dull. Her narcissism is entirely garden-variety, not rising to the level of a pathology; her depression, while sometimes well-conveyed, is clearly situational and never really a cause for worry; her many lies involve no real risk, and are ultimately inconsequential. (If there's no real cost to losing, is it really even gambling?) All of this undercuts any larger themes about how the Internet has revealed the performative nature of identity, or how modern dating works, or the fictionality of the everyday and its relationship to "auto fictional" writing— or any other shallow claim about "contemporary life" one might care to extract from the non-events of this novel.In the end, the problem is not that Oyler has created a character who is a bit self-involved but that she seems to have confused the representation of a privileged life with that of an interesting one. But a person isn't more interesting just because they are able to divide their time between the great cities of Berlin and NYC. Such a character might be lucky, privileged, even enviable in their cultural opportunities ... but interesting? No. As a result, large sections of the novel are actually about as interesting as looking at someone else's holiday snaps on Instagram.The inability to distinguish between the enviable and the interesting may actually be symptom of a social media addiction—but it's one that Oyler doesn't seem to have effectively diagnosed in herself, and that profound failure of discrimination mars the book utterly.A few passages in which the character disappears down the dark tunnel of obsessive Inter-netting are well written, nicely capturing the sense of fruitless exhaustion that can come from spending too long online.But I can't help feeling that the best ideas in this book would have been better conveyed in one of Oyler's long-form articles -- without the unnecessary and perhaps even exculpatory trappings of "fictionalization." I still look forward to reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by Oyler one day — but she's no novelist.

Speaking as a European member of Generation X, False Accounts might be tailor made to pander to any prejudiced stereotypes in my psyche relating to millennials and a certain type of visitor to Europe from the US. The portrayal of the former is of living a hopelessly vacuous and shallow life on line, and of the latter as being culturally unengaged and ignorant.The first person narrator is a young woman who meets her boyfriend, Felix, while on a trip to Berlin. Back in the States, she is a writer of waspish lightweight articles for an on line publication. When he eventually returns to joiner her in New York, they settle into a fairly stable, if directionless relationship until, illicitly looking at the contents of his phone, she discovers that he is an on-line conspiracy theorist.At this point the book moved away from my expectations. The set up in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, and a plot thread about a conspiracy theorist seem to suggest a certain direction. In fact, the contents of Felix’s phone are simply a plot device which kick off a series of events which catalyse the narrator’s return to Berlin. There the book is about life on line, but it is the personal rather than the political which features.Keeping herself away from German society, the real world the narrator lives in is one of ex-pats, but her main focus is on line, and an endless array of dating sites. In both of her lives she is spectacularly dishonest, basically lying constantly to everyone, employers, would be dates, flatmates. In one extended section she pretends to exhibit the characteristics of each zodiac sign to different on line contacts.Which could all be very entertaining, whilst also being a savage critique of on line culture. Except it isn’t. I’m afraid it’s all a bit dull. In the section where she dates zodiacally, I found myself dreading the fact that there were twelve signs to get through, a feeling made worse by her padding it out with even more dishonest dates. This is a book with a message, and that message is that people are dishonest online. Well no kidding Sherlock.About from the shallowness of the book, my two main problems were that I found it impossible to emphasise in any way with the central character and the overall writing style. I would make comparisons with the central character of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. Both are “too cool for school” arty types, but while Rooney’s is ultimately, understandable, if not exactly likeable, here we are faced with simple, self absorbed brattishness. The writing style is irritatingly arch, knowingly meta, too flaming smart for its own good.Then, the plot twist. I won’t say I saw it coming, as much as hoped it wouldn't. Fairly early on, I found myself wondering if there was a plot twist, and hoping that it wouldn't be a certain thing. Well, there is, and it was, contributing to the overall feeling of shallowness.To conclude, I generally love American literary fiction. It generally has an energy, a scope which is far beyond that of its British equivalent. That is often down to the fact that US authors tend to be ambitious, taking on big themes, whereas too many of the Brits spend their time moaning about how dreadful it us to be middle class. Congratulations Ms Oyler, you’ve written a novel in the British style.

I think I am the wrong everything for this book. My position was summed up two-thirds of the way through, "They feel an obligation to finish, having gotten this far, but they have to admit, they're looking forward to reading other things."Nevertheless, it was worth finishing. What an ending!

The author tells the story in the first person of a woman who should be going through her life's non-events' with a therapist rather than with a public audience. It normalizes behaviors that are not morally acceptable, e.g. devising tactics to go through your partner's phone without ever feeling remorse, tactics to manipulate people, etc. I spent the first half of the book wishing I could talk to her and tell her 'do you realize what you are even saying?' and eventually had to give up as reading it wasn't giving me anything valuable back.

Never before have I abandoned a book. But this one got me; rambling, losing threads, language used to convey linguist capability rather than having relevance... I’m so disappointed I felt compelled to write my first ever review so the next buyer does their research first. Make sure your remember to breathe, it’s hard to come up for air at any point.

I wanted to love this and find it clever as some reviews asserted but I found this a staccato ramble of the authors self absorbed soliloquies with little narrative to carry and progress the story along. In particular, when key events seem to be dismissed to irrelevance when the book revolved on them. I struggled to finish reading this.