Fake Accounts Is a Trap
REVIEW: The case for Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts as metafictional prank
It’s February, 2021, and I take the Wal-Mart patio table I got for free on Craigslist out of my garage and into my backyard and run an extension cord from a plug in my house’s entryway across the lawn to my laptop. It’s cold, but I’m working from home and I’m tired of being inside. But actually I’m not working — I’m reading a book I found out about on Twitter called Fake Accounts.
My face must look like it does when I look at my phone — I don’t know, is it empty, mostly, but with some attention behind the eyes? The book is looking back with a face of its own, as books tend to do, and I think it must be the face of a woman only a little younger than me. A human face — sometimes looking at her phone, sometimes thinking about her ex-boyfriend, making sense of her life along with me. She is from somewhere and has habits, has a name and a family. Her story starts somewhere and ends somewhere else, as she herself does, as you and I do.
She was going to dump her boyfriend, but she can’t now because he’s dead. Instead she goes back to Berlin, where they met, and lies to everyone she meets. She goes on dates and lies, maybe hoping to get caught, wondering who might “break the spell” of her grief, and her narcissism. But another part of her knows that no such thing will happen. She is engaged, in the living and in the telling, in “audience development”, convinced there’s nothing else to life.
She lies, nothing happens, and it all ends in mock-climax with a big rainstorm, and a cut on her leg from some nettles. Cut to the ending. Her boyfriend isn’t dead — he faked the whole thing. She sends him an angry email, but she gets no explanation and doesn’t expect one. Later she sees him on the street in Berlin. There are throwaway details that could imply that she’s grown up a little — she takes breaks from her phone and is working on her German. But she surprises us when she simply confronts him about a tweet of hers he stole — "I'm a pretty girl and I'm always late!". “That’s my tweet,” she says.
He makes an inscrutable face in response, giving her some money and saying: "That's part of the point". That’s it — the book ends there.
Did he fake his death to teach her a lesson about how shallow and narcissistic she is? This would make Fake Accounts into a dark coming-of-age story, where the misguided and immature narrator is pushed into new self-consciousness by her psychopathic boyfriend. But isn’t that too obvious? And is there anything really in that abrupt ending that points us to this? When we search for evidence of growth in the narrator, the only thing we can find are those throwaway details at the end. In fact, she learns nothing and doesn’t mature, despite what some statements in the opening sections of the book appeared to suggest.
But how strong was the suggestion really? Was I bringing my own expectations and wishes to the book? Could I find much evidence beyond a few stray lines for my sense of where the book was going? The more I looked back, the more the narrator’s story seemed strangely empty. What I thought was momentum of plot or character development actually drove toward nothing, or just drove to the next riff.
What is the significance of the idea of a stolen tweet for the book? What if the whole book is a tweet? Its plot could be seen as a series of tweets, some of them “stolen”, or written in “stolen” styles. What if the characters are better understood as profiles, as social media accounts? This makes the book only apparently human. Its figures are actually components in a machine designed to get attention online. Or, better put, they have designed themselves to get attention online and the book has arranged them into a good tweet — a tweet that will get attention. Stolen or fake doesn’t apply, only what makes a good tweet. Human change across time doesn’t apply either. Social media profiles, knowing only presentation, simply show the latest version of their surface, as if they had always been that way.
When you add the question of Oyler’s presence in the book, of whether it is at all autobiographical, it becomes what might be called “anti-autofiction”, in this view. That is, instead of the author stepping out from behind the fictional veil to offer their real self to the reader, Oyler’s book hints at a human presence — possibly the author’s presence — and then snaps back at you when you attempt to find it.
Felix’s inscrutable face becomes an emblem of the book’s pervasive shallowness, its stubborn refusal of our searches for human depth. We can ask it for characters with transparent psychology, for an author with a more obvious relationship to the material in the book, for hope that people can learn and change over time, but it will refuse. It is, as the narrator puts it late in the book, like arguing with someone online you’ll never meet — an empty, stubborn, inhuman face.
This has a distinctly chilling effect, and for me it induced something I started calling “interpretive panic”. I kept attempting to find a way to read some humanity — even some consistent reality — into the book, but I would only come up empty the more I looked back. There was no hook, no critic’s thing to grasp, that might allow me to interpret it. Any attempt to make some account of my reading experience devolved into mirror games, telling not the actual story in the book but the one I had wanted to read.
This reveals another strange effect — that readers’ reactions to it tend to tell us more about them than about the book itself. Being empty in itself, it is particularly suited to be a surface for projected feelings. After it ends, it just stares back and lets the reader flail at it. I thought this was going to be a story about a young woman’s opening into a new self-consciousness in the wake of a bad relationship, but it was just a tweet. I wanted the book to respond and reassure me, but the face that looked back was not human.
This also makes it resistant to criticism. It is difficult to be more clever than its design, as it absorbs many possible responses critics might have. If they say — “you just wrote a book of tweets”, “you just parodied other writers’ styles”, “your characters learned nothing”, “the book is amoral”, “this narrator is narcissistic”, “the book shows there’s nothing worth writing about in Millenial life”, “after I finished the book I was left only with frustration”, “the book is full of hostility for its own sake”, “everything and everyone in the book is fake”, “this is a book that you yourself would have eviscerated in a review” — it can simply reply, as Felix does, “that’s part of the point”.
Felix’s response forces the reader into the same bafflement Oyler’s narrator must have felt hearing those words. If we wanted human depth, guidance toward virtue, or were hoping for an autofictional totem to cling to, the ending is here to punish us. Fiction and the critic’s work of interpreting it are nullified. Look back — there is nothing there.
I wrote the above two sections last year, a few months after I read Fake Accounts, and then in June 2021 Bookforum published a piece by Oyler about trolling literary people that seemed to confirm my thesis about the book being a work of “anti-autofiction”. She writes:
The literary world—full of gullible romantics, blinkered narcissists, and people who understand their preferences as inseparable from their souls and therefore never to be insulted—is easy to troll.
She mentions a novel about “tricking people into exposing their own bad taste”, and then further:
Nell Zink and Ottessa Moshfegh have given interviews suggesting that they consider at least some of their popular, ostensibly literary works to be total crap they wrote for money. “People are writing commercial, relatively simple novels that read to me like young-adult fiction,” Zink told Bomb. “Because it’s debased and corrupt, it was very important to me that I get in there and take part in the spoils of decadence.” Attempts to take advantage of the system while you criticize it could be seen as a cowardly play to have it both ways; of course, this is infuriating, too.
Trolls, she says,
might survey the scene, find it desperately wanting, and, rather than just accept it, dare to assert themselves in it with intention and control.
She is speaking in generalities and discussing other books, but isn’t this clearly just a veiled discussion of Fake Accounts?
Some time ago — I guess it’s years now— I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group at my office job. We would order Chinese food and shut ourselves in a windowless meeting room and make ourselves sick on scallion pancakes, pretending to be dwarves and elves until nine and ten o’clock at night. On one of those nights another employee came in and tried, while the dungeon master was talking, to quiz members of the group with mock-sincere questions about the game. “Wait, what did he just say? … what are you guys doing …?”. It was one of those archetypal encounters with The Enemy that every nerdy person knows from high school or at least movies about high school. Their inner child is hurt and frowns and looks around for support, hoping the person will just go away.
Replace those nerds with literary people writing autofiction and you have good targets for trolling. Can you believe it? This is what they do — they stay at home and write books about “characters” that are just barely faked versions of themselves, and then they go to places like book stores and basically have public therapy sessions with “readers”, touching their temples and closing their eyes — thinking, searching, saying things like: “my narrator … she’s very concerned about climate change, but she’s also really hoping to reconcile with her mom.” But unlike the Dungeons & Dragons nerds they make artistically respectable careers out of this — sometimes even lucrative ones!
After having watched all this for too long, even people who love literary books might eventually want to walk in and break a few things, and the trollish aspect of Fake Accounts has taken this impulse as its mission. It wants to upend ways of reading and writing that it finds too precious and professional and that possibly might be lucrative (even while taking advantage of them itself). It sees authors writing autofiction and critics writing their autofictional reviews, in circles. Fake Accounts enters this arena like a disease, a rotten presence.
Harold Bloom has a funny remark about Joshua Cohen, whose book The Netanyahus was my subject last month —
… Joshua Cohen has a charmed and doomed gift for evoking equivocal emanations from excessively eminent essayists. I cannot exert enthusiasm for these ambivalent echoing reverberations, but, then, I do not possess extensive erudition on the question of our younger American novelists. 1
This is also appropriate for Fake Accounts, which is a spawning pool for ambivalent echoing responses from readers and critics.
The book is annoying because it’s written precisely to generate that kind of response, and it thinks it’s all very funny, because there’s actually nothing there to swing at. It is not a work of fiction, at least not the way you think it is. It is a trap for over-educated literary readers to trick them into exposing their own bad taste.
In its demoniacal python’s grip of its victims, where any reaction will only tighten the death-squeeze, it’s like certain manipulative bureaucratic personalities you might encounter in a cutthroat office environment. There is nothing you can do with these dominating and dangerous entities — they will find a way to pin you down and make you work for them. They have mastered the social media style of displaying a shiny public surface that resembles a human personality and entraps others by encouraging them to be vulnerable. Vulnerability in others becomes information, which then becomes blackmail for bureaucratic machination, and any resistance or attempt to subvert the game with machinations of your own quickly turns into mad operas of hidden tension and frantic gathering of written proof of What Really Happened to show to Human Resources later. The only reliable survival tactic is bland agreeable professionalism and otherwise silence. Speak as little as possible, offer as little information as possible, and you can sneak past them. But the creepy workplace surface they’ve made for themselves, which only imitates being human — you’re stuck with it as long as you work there too.
If autofiction is its own kind of creepy professional surface, pretending to be deep and artful and human while really just being a method for selling yourself and appearing virtuous, then it must be destroyed. Maybe Fake Accounts will succeed in its quest. You will be free from its games once you stop playing your own.
If you liked this review, you may be interested in some follow-up posts: an essay comparing the novel with other authors, and a poem.
From p 504 of The Bright Book of Life. What’s with all those e’s?
Great review