Leave Autofiction Alone!

Fake Accounts … Ben Lerner … Philip Roth … Thomas Pynchon

I wanted to follow up last week’s review of Fake Accounts with some more informal notes on the book comparing it to other authors.

---

Fake Accounts and Ben Lerner

The genre of “autofiction” now ascendant in literary writing identifies the main character of a book with its author, mixing events from the author’s life with fiction. Unlike older books that would have been called “autobiographical fiction,” it makes no effort to hide this mixing. Characters’ names are kept the same, “real” events are treated equally with fictional events. There is no signal to tell the reader when the real has crossed into fiction. The genre also resists forming a plot, preferring instead to emphasize ordinary, documentary-like experience.

Some authors writing in this genre — Ben Lerner, for example — use it to search for a more moral way of being an individual in a complex world. You could say we’ve been trained by Lerner and similar writers to go to autofiction to read about characters with lives as ordinary and uneventful as ours, just trying their best to be better people, and that we have learned to assume that their characters’ moral searching implies the author’s own efforts to be a better person.

But if you read Fake Accounts this way, you fall into its trap. It hints at being a story of personal growth. It even references Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, which is also about an American wandering a European country acting like an asshole. The hero of that book slowly starts to open up, to become a kinder person. A terrorist bombing in Madrid shocks him into a deeper political consciousness, and pushes him to take his own writing ambitions more seriously. Oyler’s protagonist, on the other hand, just gets a big rainstorm for a climax where — oh no — she gets wet and cuts her leg on some nettles while trying to rush home on her bike. I think this is directly making fun of the terrorist bombing scene from Lerner’s book.

The Fake Accounts narrator is narcissistic and nasty, and she has nothing to teach us. She learns nothing and does not change, and when her ex-boyfriend reappears at the end she only cares that he stole one of her tweets. The book ends with his taunting response, and the skull-like non-expression of his face.

The whole book is a taunt. The autofiction reflex, where the reader says “oh, this is really about the author, she’s showing us how she’s grown …”, is invalidated. But even the normal fiction reflexes, where we try to identify with the character, empathize with her, or at least imagine her as real — even those don’t work.

I only found out this second point when I tried to write about the book. I would have instincts about the character, or about where the book went wrong as fiction, but whenever I tried to develop them, it was like the book was goading me on, saying “keep going, yes, go ahead, develop your interpretation.”

The character has no continuity. Everything she says is in the same gossipy tone, like a bunch of disconnected tweets from someone you don’t know, who might not even be real. These are tweets calculated for the book’s various audiences — earnest or sensitive readers, book reviewers, critical theory people, people looking for internet or technology themes, media people, etc.. All of it is a trap to get you talking about yourself, and to get you to assign meaning to a story in which nothing really happens. Don’t fall for it! Run fast the other way!¹

---

Fake Accounts and Philip Roth

Hey, have you noticed that the first paragraph of Fake Accounts sounds a lot like Philip Roth? I’ve seen readers point out links to Ben Lerner, Jenny Offill (or the “lyrical vignette” style in general), and Katie Kitamura, but not yet to Roth.

The first paragraph’s diction is plain, but the tone is grand. It has a wide perspective, trying to take in the climate of the country — or at least a mood drifting through one particular media landscape of the country — after the Trump election. It’s almost as if Roth himself wrote it:

Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon … People looked sad, on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged. The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere ... we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad. Although the death of any hope for humanity was surely decades in the making … it was only that short period, between the election of a new president and his holding up a hand to swear to serve the people’s interests, that made clear what had happened, that we were too late.

This is similar to the beginning of The Human Stain, when Roth writes of the 1990s as a time "when the president's penis was on everyone's mind", or the classic passage from The Dying Animal, when his characters watch the 1999 New Year's Eve celebration amidst the Y2K panic but get only a "mockery of the Armageddon we'd been awaiting". For Oyler’s narrator, it seems, the Trump election was another mock Armageddon — a chance for us to indulge our shallow knowing of how "unstoppably bad" we are.

In a Roth book, societal sanctimony and false morality give way to a deeper outrage. The senselessness of the “American berserk” confounds Roth’s characters, and their inner lives become a dynamic mixture of hostility and hedonism. The same could be said of Oyler’s narrator. When we swipe away all the stylistic parodies, the self-aware irony, and the emotional reticence, she can seem almost like a Roth character, but stuck in a Millennial context.

---

Fake Accounts and Thomas Pynchon

The other writer to mention is Thomas Pynchon. The plot of Fake Accounts is very similar to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

In that book, Pynchon’s heroine Oedipa Maas becomes the executor of her recently deceased ex-boyfriend’s estate. The book is an account of her paranoid wanderings through the wreckage he’s left behind, and, by implication, the wreckage of their old relationship. At the end of the book, she’s at a stamp auction waiting to see who will bid on the mysterious lot 49, which could be the answer to various conspiracies she may have uncovered. She thinks it could be the ex-boyfriend himself, secretly not dead, but the book ends before we can see who it is. Fake Accounts has basically the same formula, but the boyfriend appears at the end to tell us his death was a hoax.

One fun way to think about this is to reflect on how the prestige of paranoia has faded over time. For Pynchon, a writer formed in the era of the Vietnam War, paranoia is essential. It is the basis of the self, of storytelling, of his political consciousness, even his cosmic or spiritual consciousness. By the time we get to Bleeding Edge, a late Pynchon book, paranoia is “the garlic in life’s kitchen”, the starting ingredient in every dish.

Pynchon plays at his books being garbage dumps of useless disconnected information, but his characters’ paranoid quests keep lighting up blinking constellations of meaning amidst the waste. The trash suddenly becomes significant. In Fake Accounts, on the other hand, Felix runs his secret Instagram conspiracy theory account, we have to assume, because he just likes lying and it’s fun to troll people. He doesn’t take it seriously as an explanation of the world and neither does the narrator. She’s no detective, and the book insists on connecting nothing together — personalities, plots, hints about themes. It’s just a bunch of junk, three hundred pages of waste, and no character is questing through it looking to make paranoid sense of the world.

Is autofiction of the Ben Lerner variety the last gasp of the paranoid self in our literature, the last remnant of paranoia’s apparent usefulness for explaining our world? Or perhaps it’s more precise to say that Fake Accounts has brought the older example of Lot 49 to autofiction and found the latter to be a kind of mediocre paranoia, a paranoia where the heart of the story always comes back to the self-absorbed me, the precious moral subject, striving to be good in the face of the crises of history. History is one endless crisis, and it’s all happening to me!

---

No More Of This Book, Please

We have to leave off writing about this book! Everything written about it eventually starts eating itself.

1. All of this makes me wonder what the upcoming TV show based on the book will be like. If the show creators read my interpretation of the book, they would realize it’s unfilmable!