RaveJacobinOyler skillfully does what she sets out to do: diagnose a subset of a generation that is terminally online, painfully lonely, performatively political, and full of pathological liars. Any potential remedies, or even an explicit prognosis, are nowhere to be found; neither Oyler nor our narrator is interested in providing them. Fake Accounts is a hyper self-aware, self-conscious account of the life of a woman who can see her and others’ problems in high relief but is, mostly, uninterested in solving them. I wish this book didn’t exist. Not because it’s bad — quite the opposite. Oyler is a talented prose stylist, darkly funny at times, biting, clever. Her narrator’s observations of the world are crystal-clear and true. But it’s a dark, lonely, alienated world where our narrator lives — and which has produced this novel. I wish it weren’t so.
