Every person is equally deserving of love, but not every person is equally capable of giving it. Loving is a skill like any other—it can be honed through practice and lost through disuse. Even when the will to love is strong, it can be undermined by our other, more rigorously cultivated abilities. A keen memory can make us slow to forgive, an eye for accounting can make our generosity clumsy, and a talent for social media, as Lauren Oyler shows in her novel Fake Accounts, can lead our amorous impulses astray.
Oyler’s narrator has developed this talent with the discipline of a martial artist, mastering everything from the small arms of punctuation to the requisite psychological judo. She can make dumb people feel smart and smart people feel dumb. She can bring strangers into her confidence while baffling those who seem to know her. She can bend the truth without eliciting scrutiny. These skills are how she survives: they allow her to earn a living at her despised New York media blogging job. More importantly, they help her win the attention of Felix, her favorite boyfriend. They also allow her to write a love story that, judging by other reviews, is almost imperceptible as such.
This story begins in Berlin, where Felix and the narrator meet on a guided bar crawl, he the ironical guide, she the reluctantly guided. Like the narrator, Felix is a top-notch dissimulator, his lies so spontaneous and specific as to be indecipherable, even to an expert like her. She describes him, as she does the internet, primarily through oxymorons, often using similar ones. After their long-distance email affair blossoms into a relationship, with Felix joining her in New York, he reveals himself only “to be completely unrevealing.” At times it feels as if he’s both “invading” her life and “abandoning” her. He pretends to be an offline type, but this too is a lie: the novel opens with the narrator’s discovery, while snooping on his phone, that he secretly runs a popular right-wing conspiracy Instagram account.
She claims to have been considering a break-up anyway, so this development is as much cathartic as horrifying. “I was now liberated from trying to untangle” him, she remarks, before spending many paragraphs trying to untangle him. Now I’ll definitely break up with him, she thinks, before putting it off for weeks. Finally the question is rendered moot: while she’s in D.C. for the Women’s March, she learns that Felix has died in a bike accident. Once again she plays it cool, chalking her tears up to hormones, saying that Felix had been “dead to” her for a while, before once again proceeding to think about him constantly, feeling “claustrophobic” at their inability to speak. After quitting her job and moving to Berlin (where Felix had always wanted to return), she goes on many dates with ostensibly viable men, but remains closed off to romantic or sexual connection—all she seems interested in is becoming a better liar.
Her obsession with Felix isn’t merely post-mortem nostalgia. However much her lackluster politics may object, it is the conspiracy account that attracts her: “I had known since I found the account that his manipulative insincerity was a fair response to the way the world was. But since I had no one to admit that to, I was going to keep that to myself.” Felix, she’s positive, didn’t believe in conspiracies, nor was the account monetized, so he must have been operating it only for kicks, although also at substantial personal risk, given his ur-Brooklyn social position. In her eyes, this seems to make Felix paradoxically honest: if social media makes insincerity inevitable, isn’t it better to practice it knowingly, for no good reason, as if it were a grisly art to be done for art’s sake?1
Diving for earnest connection amid the deepest depths of falsehood may seem like an odd sport, but it captures the narrator’s existential contradiction: lost in her own self-constructed maze of fake accounts, she is in fact desperate to be known, to be interpreted like a beloved book by a diligent reader, yet she revolts from giving anyone the power over her that such an understanding would necessarily entail. On one date she feels “euphoric” when the guy turns out to have read all her writing (“He could have…come up with a theory about me”); later she’s offended when an acquaintance congratulates her on moving to Berlin, which he says she’s “always” wanted (“Where had he found the authority to say I had ‘always’ wanted to do anything?”).
Felix offered a decent compromise between the two extremes, his irony and unpossessiveness tempering what authority he might draw from understanding her. Still, a short-distance relationship can only have so much remove. The narrator describes once showing up at Felix’s apartment unannounced, driven by a desire for provocative flirtation. But her interest disappears the moment he notices and responds in kind: “I’d been operating on the adrenaline produced by my attention-seeking but upon his display of agency I suddenly wanted to leave.” Getting his attention means losing full control (except in one fantasy she drunkenly tells him: fucking him with a strap-on while he reads her book). In the end, she settles for giving a blowjob, but it’s clear that Felix’s physical personhood is an affront to her (with sex itself not far behind).
The internet lacks this disadvantage. Historians describe wars as being shaped by either offensive or defensive technologies, and in the social realm the internet is primarily the latter, more trench warfare than blitzkrieg, precisely because it is decoupled from physicality. Online attention-seeking can provoke lust, and her followers’ come-ons sometimes inspire “paranoid analysis,” but thwarting their displays of agency never requires a literal blowjob. A tweet is never in the same room, staring in expectation, hands on its hips. And the sheer quantity of eyeballs online holds out the possibility of a quality interpretation. The pleasure that the narrator finds on Twitter, and even more pointedly on OKCupid after Felix’s death, is of turning herself into an omnipresent and compulsively addictive puzzle, like a human Utah monolith, yet without giving up an ounce of control to anyone who wants to take a shot.
On the other hand, the narrator recognizes that this is fundamentally a dead-end pleasure, little more than a way of killing time. The amount of calculation and lies it requires precludes the sort of digital serendipity that propelled, say, the real-life Patricia Lockwood, who, by posting her work to early-aughts poetry forums, not only found a much-needed creative community, but also met her husband-to-be. To Oyler’s narrator, this story probably sounds like a fairy tale, from a bygone era before humans had hunted credulity to extinction. She lacks the explosive mix of anonymity and desperation that can produce an internet folk hero. And so while she keeps logging on and playing her games, her lone actual hope is apocalyptic: she waits for “news of something large and encompassing that would shift us out of this place and back where we belonged.”
This dragging hopelessness makes the internet of Fake Accounts seem less like a unique, separate ecosystem and more like a conspiracy theory, a literal one. It is a system of pure meaning creation, one that can take the chaff of life (like the office intern doing push-ups at the narrator’s joking behest) and convert it into a bottomless pit of narrative and interpretation. Very concretely, it is a system where everything is linked to everything else, except, of course, to actual reality—this becomes clearer after the narrator moves to Berlin but continues haunting American social media, sifting information that has nothing to do with her day-to-day existence. Finally, even as the system tantalizes with a vision of understanding the world and one’s place in it, participation only amplifies the defense mechanisms and thought patterns that made one anxious and alienated in the first place. Gradual escape becomes impossible; the only salvation can be the big reveal, the truth bomb that clears the entire awful edifice, the “news of something large and encompassing,” which the narrator equates with suicide, which in turn she equates with freedom from all tedium and responsibility. What she wants is the final Q Drop of the soul.
And Felix, as the narrator describes him early on, is “scarily anticipatory of others’ wants,” and more so than she could have known. As it turns out, he did not kill himself. He reappears toward the end of the novel, having faked his own death, seemingly as an art project. But if that’s what it was, the narrator wonders, what could have been the goal? “The statement he was trying to make would have been better publicized by a famous or at least esoterically notorious figure…Who cared about [Felix]? No one.” Except, of course, the obvious person, the one who, when she finds out, feels “aghast and uncertainly impressed…horrified and nauseatingly flattered,” wondering if it was a test of her love that she’d “clearly failed.”
That she imagines she might have failed testifies to how insidiously Felix designed his project. Consider all that transpired after she found the (fake?) conspiracy account and learned about his death: her obsession with him was rekindled and she learned “all those death lessons people learn,” namely that she should quit her stupid job and stop wasting her “precious time on earth,” a realization that led her to move to Berlin, where Felix had been pushing them to settle, and eventually write a novel, as he’d been encouraging her to do. Therapy can only dream of these results.
Is this love? By puppet-mastering the narrator’s life makeover so effectively, Felix reveals that he knows her down to an essential level, yet without impinging on her sense of agency. That’s the contradiction she’s always wanted, except that the reality of it is horrifying, because it involves undermining her agency without her awareness, not to mention leaving her totally alone. On the other hand, the interpretation is now up to her, and really Felix just spent months living a weird art project that only she could appreciate, knowing full well he might never know whether she does. Although, if she ever admits he was right…
But interpretation is the game these characters want us to play, because it’s the game they always win, except with each other. In the last scene, they ‘happen to’ cross paths, Felix appearing on the street where the narrator is having coffee. Wary and wry like old rival gunslingers, they’re utterly stuck for moves, barely managing to squeeze out a few unrevealing sentences. His manipulative insincerity, even when raised to an art form, cannot clear the mental landscape of landmines and barbed wire that separates them. His project is just one more impenetrable fortress, and afterwards, in writing her equally evasive novel, the narrator will build one of her own. Hiding behind their walls, they will wave some ambiguity above the parapet, trying to tempt the other into an attack that will never come. If they were afraid of being wounded, it might be understandable. But what they really fear is learning that they’ve grown too weak to even open the gate.
To my knowledge, none of this is mentioned in other reviews, not even the very obvious fact of the narrator’s continued attachment to Felix, even though the story makes no sense without it. I suspect that, between how politically unpalatable the narrator’s reasoning is, and how much the narrative is coded as auto-fiction, critics naturally turned away from this reading because they didn’t want to deal with imputing these views to Oyler herself. We usually assume that our contemporary unwillingness to separate character and author would make problematic views harder to pull off in fiction, but maybe it also creates an opportunity for writers willing and able to play chicken with reviewers.