In this debut novel, a young woman discovers that her boyfriend Felix has an alter-ego online as a conspiracy theorist who stokes alt-right anger. When Felix dies, she moves to Germany—where she begins her own life of deception.
Whether or not the conjuring of such inwardness is reading’s greatest pleasure for you, at the very least we might agree that inwardness is a necessary precondition for creating anything worth reading. Or so I have believed. Here I sit, having just completed a novel that lines up these pieties and threatens to dispatch them with calm and ruthless efficiency ... it is most thoroughly and exuberantly about the hunched, clammy, lightly paranoid, entirely demented feeling of being 'very online' — the relentlessness of performance required, the abdication of all inwardness, subtlety and good sense ... The novel has Points it would like to make — about self-mythologizing on the internet and in life, the overlap of the virtual and the actual; they are obvious and easily mapped. The riffs are its strongest aspects ... You can get away with this sort of thing in a review, if you want to — creating dramas in which you, the critic, get to burst in waving a little sword, setting the world right. But can this safe, self-certain, self-congratulatory voice sustain a novel? Fake Accounts is, essentially, many of these interactions strung together. Oyler’s characters are unapologetic foils, useful idiots babbling on about 'wellness' and turmeric who allow our brilliant, irascible narrator to rant eloquently at familiar targets, like patronizing self-professed 'male feminists,' bourgeois white women who insist they are oppressed ... The book isn’t written in little bursts or fragments (a form the narrator deplores, and parodies to good effect), but the tone is identical, that callow, quippy cleverness, the disdain... 'Yes, but,' I say, for all its forceful and stylish prose, for Oyler’s signature denunciation of moral equivocation and imprecision in thought and language. 'Yes, but' because I felt sharpened by it, grateful for its provocations ... She settles on 'difficult but worth it.' I might describe this novel similarly — not difficult but maddening at times, too cautious, regrettably intent on replicating the very voice it critiques. But worth it, yes, especially if you’re up for a fight, to liven up whatever inwardness remains to you.
It’s a brilliant comic novel about the ways in which the internet muddles all of our interior rivers while at the same time polluting the seas of the outer world, and about how these processes might be one and the same thing ... the descriptive prose is casually great ... a fascinating work of cultural analysis. Every sentence tells ... a prismatically intelligent work of art.