Entry 09: “Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…”

Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021)

Oyler’s protagonist, the “I” telling this story, is a white, attractive young woman from Brooklyn. Finding her lover, Felix, to be inscrutable, she cracks his password then awakens at 3 a.m. to access his phone. It’s a profound violation of trust which causes the reader to squirm — but our sympathies tip to her when she discovers, while scrolling through reprehensible content, his paranoid conspiracy site and its multitude of followers. Who is Felix really? How did the protagonist fail to grasp his true character? Having lived on the west-coast myself for more than 20 years, I had some insight into Felix, based on what Oyler reveals about where he grew up, what his mother does for a living, and the school he attended. Both the narrator and Felix are fond of high culture references; clearly they’re intelligent. Yet the protagonist’s occupation — writing vapid blog posts (“which moisturizer is best?”) for a mediocre internet media company — necessitates her involvement in a “system that ran on panic and distraction.” She wants to break up with Felix, but delays. Then his mother calls with disturbing news. 

Early in the novel, the protagonist and Felix, an artist, “meet cute” in Berlin. Felix tells strangers “little, inconsequential lies… to delight himself and fluster me.” Eventually the protagonist quits her job and decamps to Berlin — and indulges in this same pastime. Do her own ‘fake accounts’ delight us? For a time. And yet these fictive narratives, offered to a revolving stream of strangers, remain alienated from her emotional life; she exists separately from these tales, there’s little at stake. It isn’t until Oyler resumes building toward her “surprise” ending (which I anticipated, pegging Felix as less Stephen Miller and more Ariel Pink, less suit, more punk) that the tension ticks up again. While the middle of the book is a detour (much the way Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter’s quirky tales-within-a-tale exist siloed from the lives of the other characters) we gather, by the end, that Oyler’s satire on modern life speaks to our current condition. If, in 1910, E.M. Forster exhorted us to “only connect,” in 2022, tangled in Twitter threads, we’re more disconnected than ever. Constructing online Facebook profiles and social media avatars, we’re all complicit in spinning “fake accounts” — revealing only those aspects of ourselves we allow others to see. ***Recommend