MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)The repetition of ‘think’ doesn’t signal any particular thoughtfulness on the narrator’s part. It points, rather, to half-finished ideas, to what a writing teacher I once had called the ‘vomit draft’—the first attempt at getting thoughts down. It begins to feel as though the book’s section breaks, indicated by three asterisks in a row, are merely pauses between the character’s unedited, incessantly articulated impressions. Between these aimless (if pithy) ruminations, Oyler’s writing can be precise, even dazzling ... It’s all wearying, or interesting, or better yet, an example of parataxis. Our protagonist doesn’t change in any perceptible way. She feels confused in her new home and occasionally longs for clarity, or requires translation, but those feelings are swiftly addressed using her phone, or by retreating inside her own head. She remains essentially static, despite the nice descriptions of Berlin’s Neukölln neighbourhood ... Oyler is good at capturing the mood of online engagement, but less successful when it comes to the emotional impulse behind her protagonist’s Twitter addiction ... The narrator is so absorbed in her own detachment that it’s hard to see past the obfuscation ... All the chatter gives the reader the dizzying sense of being permanently online, but doesn’t reveal anything meaningful about the characters, the narrator included. Although she admits that she is ‘dependent on social media for a humiliatingly large percentage of [her] self-esteem, social life and reading material’, that dynamic is never animated, or maybe it gets lost in the narrator’s other impressions. This is a misstep ... it seems like a cop-out ... The pervasive whiteness of Fake Accounts sometimes appears unconscious ... Between flashes of humour and imagination, the thinly veiled criticism is the best part of the book ... Oyler the critic has bumped into Oyler the novelist (I don’t know which group, novelists or critics, is more debased). Their collision is this book.
Danzy Senna
RaveThe BafflerNew People is an achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also convincingly distills the essence of an 'intentional community' in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of the 'tragic mulatto,' a mixed-race person who’s traumatized by their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and their attendant social schema ... Just as this novel fits neatly into Senna’s oeuvre, it also chimes with and challenges the larger canon of works that take on multiracial identity.
