PositiveThe RumpusRax King has paid so much attention to the formative cultural artifacts of her youth that she is able to make me feel as if I have my own memories of experiences we absolutely do not share ... The fact that grief can become tied to the memory of something lighthearted is one that is woven well through her choices of subjects ... Even if some of the specificities of King’s experiences might be foreign to you, as they are to me, the adolescent pangs will not be ... I don’t agree with everything King says...But the throughlines that peek through each essay—the importance of the megacrush, young little luxuries, music that feels too embarrassing to admit to listening to, messy role models—are honest and potent. Her enthusiasm in offering a new perspective to the tacky things we’d sometimes rather let idle on in our memories leaves you a little raw, thinking about the things in your own adolescence you could have enjoyed more if you hadn’t learned so early the most ironic ways to protect your heart when an adult brain and body were \'forcing their way to the surface\'.
Lauren Oyler
RaveFull StopAll of this makes for a very clever and entertaining comedy of manners; Fake Accounts proves that Oyler can apply her astute observational skills to fiction just as well as her criticism, and her treatment of social media is where they’re at their sharpest. The book is as close an approximation can get of what it’s like to be desperately reaching for meaning when the lines between work and life are so shot through with social media as to be rendered ineffective; when earnestness is passé, except when used sparingly by hip personalities on Twitter before returning to regularly scheduled nihilistic content ... A related intrigue that Fake Accounts deftly executes, so smoothly as to almost be incidental even though of course it isn’t, is capturing interpersonal dynamics as perceived by young women who have had to broker some sort of peace with themselves regarding the fact that there is almost nothing that doesn’t feel like a performance, especially when dealing with men ... the cleverest ending to a book I’ve read in a long time, and I’ll be thinking of it while reading everyone else’s reviews of this book when they come out and the discourse that might follow — knowing that might be entirely by design ... By ducking and weaving around earnestness, by painting so lurid a portrait of how performative irony online can calcify emotional muscles and corrode the ability to relate to others in a way that isn’t mediated by technology at all, Oyler has created a narrator who is both wholly unreliable, pretty unlikeable, and something of a stand-in for her own public persona. I cannot tell whether I would have liked the style of Fake Accounts as much had it not come from someone whose writing and opinions I mostly already trust, or if I would have thought it overly defensive in her need to set it apart from the other contemporary voices of a generation, when they’re usually all talking over each other anyway. But figuring that out seems to be, as Oyler might have put it, entirely beside the point.
