JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I know I say “brilliant” a lot, but this book is a light source in our shady times. Initially I was drawn by the premise—woman discovers boyfriend is a popular anonymous conspiracy theorist on Instagram—but I was swiftly, then happily disappointed. It veered from the direction I’d expected and went straight into my life. Our lives, for we all live in our phones now. (I’m not saying that a novel is better because it’s “relatable” or “relevant,” but it gives the reading experience a sense of urgency.)

Fake Accounts sounds like a sharp, scathing book review, the sort I seldom see anymore because everyone has to play nice (while wishing someone would do a takedown because those are fun). I thought the tone would change at some point, but when it became clear that it would be sustained throughout, I stopped to google the author. (Which is a point the book makes, that our primary relationship is with screens and I often stop needlessly to check my phone.) Turns out I’d read Oyler before—her cutting book reviews shut up the hallelujah chorus that usually greets new work by media darlings. (The outlier/dissenting opinion is not necessarily better, but reading it is more useful for brain function.)

Then it struck me: This is what the Internet sounds like. People trying to sound smarter than they are while making the reader think she’s smarter than she is. It’s hilarious, and it’s genius. Fake Accounts is a comedy of manners set at a time when people demand authenticity even as they invent themselves online.

Following her boyfriend’s death the unnamed narrator quits her job at a media company, goes to Berlin (where she’d met her boyfriend) with no real plan, and joins a dating website. Half the book is about her dates, and it’s not a series of sexcapades. We get detailed accounts of attempts to connect with potential partners and create something real—as if this were possible when her personality and history change with each encounter. One day she’s a massage therapist, the next day a classical musician, because it’s so easy to turn into someone else (and if I claim that my cat is writing this you’ll think I’m kidding but how do you know I’m not?) Later she invents profiles according to astrological signs. Astrology isn’t real, she notes, but its influence on how people behave is real. Everyone insists they’re real, but what’s real?

The narrator is observing life rather than living it, describing emotions rather than feeling them, performing a self rather than being it. Welcome to the age of social media, which promises to connect us by putting screens between us. Where you expose your innermost thoughts in exchange for attention, and the more attention you get, the less control you have over your own thoughts (Because once you’ve had a million likes, you cannot settle for half a million). Where you are the show and your life is a performance.