Fake Accounts is a demonstration in all things social media: colloquial, entertaining, and addictive. The narrator herself appears hyperaware to the concept of being perceived both in online and real life, testing the familiarity of what it means to get to know someone, even if it turns out they're an online conspiracy theorist. Diving into the digital is still not entirely Fake Account's intent, as it remains human without trying to moralize a space like the internet, emphasizing its default configuration being an infinite, impartial, doom-scroll of study, and I couldn't put it down.

Happy to feature this new title in February’s edition of Novel Encounters, my monthly column rounding up the top new fiction titles for Zoomer magazine’s Books section.
To read the feature, click on the link.

Hugely entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny. Captures a mood and a moment better than any book I’ve read.

A slightly maddening book about being "extremely online," FAKE ACCOUNTS is not exactly what it promises, but it is a look at a realistic slice of life for many 20/30 year olds today. The middle was meandering and I was bored at times, but the beginning and end are pretty explosive. Clearly a book that will be discussed endlessly.

This isn't really a novel as much as an extremely long monologue by the most self-absorbed person ever. Sometimes funny, but more often just annoying, it is a critique on writing your life, instead of actually living it. It made me feel old and also glad that I'm not young now.

I created a Twitter account once. I was 16 and tweeted, "So much homework tonight but at least we're going out for hibachi dinner!" The post-tweet shame came quickly. I deleted the tweet and my account less than 3 minutes later.

In Fake Accounts Oyler nails the intoxication and isolation borne by the neverending deluge of social media posts. Her unnamed protagonist pulls us through a tumultuous year in her life in a stream of consciousness narration. The result is a book that reads just how social media can feel: exciting and breathless as we get to live inside someone’s mind and suffocating and lethal as we realize we can’t escape it. I grew to enjoy our protagonist, who moves to Berlin during a devastating quarter-life crisis after her boyfriend unexpectedly dies while she’s at the post-2016 election Women’s March in DC, but I also wanted to never hear her voice again.

Oyler is a playful writer: a chorus of ex-boyfriends cheers and shames the protagonist; an astrological interstitial leads to several dates where our narrator bases her persona on zodiac signs; and time is topsy turvy, jumping backwards and forward and back again. Beneath these amusing experiments is an impressive intelligence. I am not entirely sure what to make of everything in Fake Accounts. Unlike its dominant subject of interest--social media, the words need time to marinate, promising delayed rather than instant gratification.

I was bored at moments, but I could never quit it entirely (kinda how I feel when I’m infinite scrolling on Instagram). Oyler and her protagonist are ultimately ambivalent about social media. Reading Fake Accounts I felt that two contradictory things had to be true: in some ways social media is the purest form of ourselves, our thoughts and good hair days and aesthetically pleasing homemade cookies streaming endlessly from a fount that cannot be capped. Yet it’s difficult to be a person on social media, a person in the sense of a collection of traits, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that are specific to your pile of cells. We think we’re being unique but we’re stealing from others: protesting in DC not because we care but because everyone else replied yes to the Facebook event; going to Berlin to suffer a quarter-life crisis because that’s where other artsy wannabe expats go, or so say Instagram algorithms.

Clever, funny, and exhausting. I’m glad I read it!

Now this is what I like to call a relevant and modern book. Lauren Oyler is clearly a gifted writer with her finger on the millenial/gen z pulse. In fact, it's surprising this book is coming out in 2021, as Trump is leaving office. In spite of its slightly shocking and inflammatory plot (which I'm 100% here for), I found the prose to be slightly unbearable. Sentences seemed to run on for ever, with no clear direction. Oyler's attempt to get the reader into the protagonist's mind unfortunately took me far deeper than I wanted or than I found necessary. It was like being stuck in front of a rambling friend who doesn't know when to wrap up the story.

In Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s debut novel on shelves this Tuesday, we begin with our nameless narrator, who has just discovered that her boyfriend runs a secret, anonymous, right-wing conspiracy-theory Instagram, of the really nuts, “not only does jet fuel not melt steel beams, but the twin towers never existed in the first place” variety. This online persona is so fascinatingly at odds with his mildly progressive, real-life persona that she takes a sort of delight in holding out on breaking up with him for a for weeks as she observes both him and the account closely. (If this book had been written a few years later, it’s painfully easy to imagine the narrator instead finding out that her boyfriend is a Q-Anon type capitol protestor.) During this period in January 2017, the narrator decides to go down to DC for the Women’s March. While she’s there, she gets a call saying that (light spoiler:) her boyfriend has died, while biking upstate. A bit dazed, she mills around Brooklyn for a few weeks before deciding to move to Berlin, incidentally where they met. While there, she spends most of her time biking, scrolling twitter, and going on dates via app services.

That’s the gist of the plot, but more important is our presence as the reader; the narrator is constantly addressing both us and a group called “the exboyfriends” that function as a sort of greek chorus. It’s all first-person, very sardonic and tongue-in-cheek, like a book that started as a twitter thread. The tone is almost a bit.... Mean? As if the narrator’s goal, as she drifts through all these parties and dates, is to say the snarkiest bon mot. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, and it’s often quite funny, but when you hit the tenth of hundredth page of this with no move to let up or offer a balancing note of authenticity or vulnerability, it gets exhausting. Even more so during diversions from the “plot” itself, where the narrator begins a rant about social media or modern life that sounds pulled from a rough draft of a magazine article. Eventually, the narrator does make the point that the beauty of fiction is that she doesn’t need to justify these tangents; the reader can fill in the blanks of connections. In reality, the ask is less of whether the reader can fill in the blanks, but whether we want to bother.

As far as authenticity vs reality goes, it isn’t just the social media profiles, though they are significant; every encounter these people have, with themselves, each other, and the reader, is fake more often than not (hence, of course, the title). The narrator invents new personas on a whim, and makes a game out of going on dozens of internet dates as everyone but herself. The catch, of course, is that all these fake personalities are just as much her as she is, if not more important than whatever her “real” self is under all these performances. The act of performance is essential to her self.

Reading this book had the same effect on me as getting lost in an Instagram spiral, where you look up somebody that you met in passing or even just heard of, and feel ambivalent about or just mildly dislike, and then get so caught up in sketching out this person based on their own social media performance even though you know social media isn’t real, and you emerge minutes or hours later in a dissatisfied, self-loathing fugue. You never feel like you’re inside the narrator’s mind, despite the first-person perspective; rather, as this narrator is conscious of her own narration, you’re aware that this is a performance or narrative done for your benefit, with the dizzyingly layered shadow-play of this person who is pretending to be authentic, and you know they aren’t being authentic, and maybe they know you know they’re not being authentic, but the performance itself is the key to the understanding of that person. If you’re still with me after that sentence, my point is: I love messy, unreliable characterization, if it feels deliberate. Overall, this does. Less forgivable is the pacing, what may be intended to be a send-up of postmodernism or post-postmodernism but instead is transparently self-satisfied and more tedious than thoughtful.

http://www.courtneymlandis.com/blog/book-review-fake-accounts
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3778077327

This was just okay for me. I would have loved more character development. The synopsis is what really drew me in, such a timely plot. I felt parts of it dragged, specifically about a third of the way through. I felt myself getting confused about which characters were which. I also would’ve loved to have had more dialogue. The writing felt spare, and sometimes that works but not as it pertains to the storyline, in this case. I really love the cover though, and could see having this book to display.

A sharp, scathing look at a woman who discovers her boyfriend is running a secret online conspiracy account.

Oyler's novel is experimental in all the right ways (narrative structure, breaking the fourth wall, "plot") and is acutely timed as it offers discussions on the protests, neoliberalism, and contemporary writers all while tackling the theme of reality versus unreality. While all millennial fiction dives into the discussions of the self in the age of the internet, Oyler sets herself apart by acknowledging every nuance and making it her own in the most intellectual, subversive, and witty way. It's both chaotic and apathetic. The conversation surrounding media and who we are online versus who we are offline never gets boring.

This book energized me! I can't wait to recommend it to readers who enjoy Anna Weiner, Sally Rooney, and Melissa Broder.

I really like Lauren Oyler's reviews and essays, and so i was looking forward to her novel a great deal. She delivers.

This was almost eerie to read because the commentary is so SPOT ON for what is happening in our current times. The writing style wasn't exactly to my taste, but that didn't take away from my enjoyment as the subject matter was so compelling.

Did not finish this book. I found the writing to be overly wordy and unrelatable. The author comes from detachment and intellectualization of her feelings. Also, the plot jumps all over the place from present time, to how she met her (now) ex-boyfriend, and combined with the wordiness and lack of flow of prose, it was not a good read.

What initially stands out in Oyler’s debut novel is its funny, often affable first-person voice. While the opening scene finds the narrator looking through her boyfriend’s phone to discover he is secretly a popular far right conspiracy theorist, this shocking realization is tempered somewhat by the backstory of how she met Felix on a pub-crawl in Berlin. Here, the narrator’s many witty remarks, insecurities, and strategy for connecting with her tour guide and future boyfriend come to the forefront. Oyler’s narrator adopts the familiar tone of mid 2000s Internet writing in the use of frequent direct address riddled with whimsical asides and over-justification of her decisions, as if anticipating the criticism of an anonymous comment section. The effect of the narrator’s frequent breaking of the fourth wall is often overwhelming; her sentences are roped into one another, commenting on the plot as it unravels, its main points muddled by frequent asides and responses to a Greek chorus of ex boyfriends. Certainly, the narrator is virtuosic, especially in her over-examination of social dynamics, and the inner-workings of an anxious, self-conscious mind; she’s trapped her in head, and we’re right there with her.

After her boyfriend’s death and its subsequent fallout, the story stagnates somewhat; the narrator returns to Berlin, but the excitement and romance of the earlier section is lost to practicalities and the mundane. We follow the narrator as she creates a dating profile, gets a casual job babysitting, and attempts to secure a tourist visa. The most fascinating part of the book is a 40-page section in which the narrator replicates the fragmented structure of many contemporary novels, the most recognizable being Jenny Offil. However, this section falls flat as Oyler can’t resist meta-commentary, which prevents her from fully committing to the bit. She fails to replicate the charm and curiosity of the forms she seeks to criticize, but this may be due in part to her narrator’s polarizing voice: some will no doubt love the whimsical tone of Internet first person while for others the quirks become grating. A surprise ending briefly recaptures our attention, and the ramifications of this might have been worth seeing more fully play out, but as an experiment in voice FAKE ACCOUNTS is nonetheless a worthwhile read.

I guess this book wasn't targeted at me - but my complaints would be that it didn't actually discuss it's blurb (a boyfriend who was a secret spreader of conspiracy lies on social media); the unnamed narrator was completely unlikeable and unapproachable; the actions were fantastical; the writing was awful and the vocabulary pompous (making the narrator even less likeable); generally just not enjoyable. Like I said, I'm not the target audience, but I surely don't know who is. Hard pass, do not recommend.

I thought that this book sounded great. What an intriguing and topical story, the brain washing of your partner by secret online conspiracies. However, I am sorry to say that this was not a very good book. Whole swathes of it are dedicated to navel gazing, recollections of past conversations and musings on what this or that hipster things means or doesn’t mean, plus long diatribes of trite political observations. None of this pontification is particularly related to the plot. In fact the plot moves painfully slowly. When something does happen it is is usually the main character just going somewhere (to the shop, to yoga, to a restaurant, to a different city), then checking her phone, and then very (very) occasionally a major plot point is revealed, after that it’s back to the musing. The language is flowery at best and bizarre (also pretentious) at worst. Sometimes using simpler language is better. For example, ‘protonostalgic fantasies’, ‘The hilarious unlikelihood of our meet-cute...’, ‘straphangers’, the way the email account ‘constantly generated’ (it doesn’t generate emails! It is itself generating? Ugh!). I hate to write negative reviews of books, and I’m so grateful to the publishers and NetGalley for the free copy, but I couldn’t get along with it. If you’re a fan of whiny narrators (just FYI I also didn’t like the much loved Normal People so perhaps I’m the wrong audience) then you will like this. Something nice, I like the cover and I learned what straphangers means.

Unfortunately this did not do for me what it did for so many people who recommended it to me. I can't say I'll be recommending it, but I'm eager to discuss it with others as it inevitably becomes the talk of the town.

DNF at 55%. The narrator drones on and on, is supercilious with no reason to be. There are long, tedious descriptions of things the audience already understands without bringing any new insights or perspectives. The hilarious part is when I thought "this reminds me of A Separation and why I hated it" and sure enough it absolutely got referenced a few pages later.

Thank you to NetGalley and Fourth Estate for the opportunity to read and review.

A young woman working in media finds out her strange boyfriend has a secret online life, in which he spreads far right conspiracies, and proceeds to untangle her relationship with him and social media at large.

I think the author is obviously talented, the book was written with a lot of honesty, wit and intelligence. There were quite a few parts where I just couldn't get through the dense thought processes of the narrator's mind and I would've liked to see more of it play out in IRL then just her imagination. Although, I suppose that was probably the point.

I thought the ending was strange, a lot of build up and then a very flat conclusion and not a lot of catharsis.

Reading this on the last week of Trump's presidency could not have been more perfect timing. Lauren Oyler has written a very modern story - a woman in a bit of a tailspin post election, does some snooping and realizes her boyfriend participates heavily in conspiracy theory online.

This book encapsulates the last four years of the US and the terror of finding out who people are online versus who they are in real life and when/if the overlap. It's a smart book, intelligent writing and modern storytelling. With literary references and internet speak, this is a book for a modern reader.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.