Doom-Scroll: On Lauren Oyler's "Fake Accounts"
Lauren Oyler | Fake Accounts | Catapult | 2021 | 272 Pages
Conspiracy has always been a problem of reading. It hinges on interpretation: what lies behind events? What is being concealed from the reader? A conspiracy suggests not just that things aren’t quite as they seem, but that someone has intentionally misled or deceived you—it’s a question of agency, of access, of how things can get in the way of knowing. And what could be more contemporary than a good old conspiracy theory? It might be my Midwest and Calvinist upbringing, but deep suspicion is certainly a crucial part of the American historical fabric. Art and language have always responded to this suspicious, conspiratorial bent: we can draw a line from early Puritan America, full of sermons that decry a suspicion of nature and the physical world, to the aesthetics of film noir, full of shadowy femme fatales and hidden weapons, all the way to QAnon and the “fake news” of twenty-first century America—all forms of anxiety about an unseen hand controlling the world. Conspiracy demands suspicion, turning a reader into a detective, turning an artist into a deceiver.
No wonder that conspiracies proliferate on the internet. The online world is a ripe field for conspiratorial thinking, for unproved theories, for popular yet unfounded takes on current events. It’s unsurprising, then, that Lauren Oyler’s new and very online novel Fake Accounts hinges on conspiracies to think about our everyday readings of people. The question becomes less, Are things as they seem? and more, Who wants me to think this way?
In Fake Accounts, the unnamed narrator wants us to think that way—she exercises a heavy hand over the reader, divulging just enough to give us the point, but never more than that. In sparse prose, we watch a sparse plot unfold. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator discovers that her mostly offline boyfriend, Felix, is in fact a popular alt-right conspiracy theorist on the internet. She decides she will break up with him and, in January of 2017, goes to the Women’s March in D.C. where she gets a call telling her that Felix has died. She grieves stateside and then moves back to Berlin—the city where she met Felix—where she spends time online and lying to people about almost everything. That’s it, that’s the plot.
And Fake Accounts is deeply self-conscious that not much happens in its plot: the meta-titled sections like “Beginning,” “Backstory,” “Climax,” and “End” only span a few pages each. The longest section of the novel by far is called “Middle (Nothing Happens).” But behind even these spare events, we wonder, really? Even the eventual surprise twist of the novel doesn’t even seem to be a surprise. We’ve been suspicious all along. It comes to feel like the narrator is all surface, no depth. She’s a handy metaphor for online life more than a believable character.
This is, of course, intentional. This novel has Big Points to make and it does so by making reading feel a bit like scrolling. The play between surface and depth betrays a sort of flat affect in the narrator, a flat affect that clearly parallels the sort of content consumption that happens online. Our protagonist reflects that “The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me” (116). We have a similar experience in reading Fake Accounts: the book is available, it’s there, but do we have an emotional connection with the narrator? Do we like or understand her? We’re reading because it’s there, but we don’t have many big feelings about it. We don’t really wonder what’s underneath this character, what motivates her. When events in the novel make sense, it’s like reading two tweets in a row that just happen to speak to each other—algorithmic coincidence.
If reading this book felt a bit like a doom-scroll—unstoppable, not always engaging but always available—then its writing echoes the narrator creating an online dating profile, an everyday conspiracy of modern life. In making these profiles, we mean to deceive our readers, concealing just enough to be attractive but not too much as to be catfishing. Our narrator does it with the perfect self-reflexive flair: “I wanted to express an alluringly evasive personality, and I knew I would have to do it through voice rather than content.” This reflection serves as an ars poetica for the whole novel. Just like packaging herself for dating apps, the narrator engages us, her readers, through voice. The content is beside the point. Fake Accounts suggests that even the content we can see can be unreliable. Our narrator chooses what photos to use, reflecting that “real photos were deceptive, too, as everyone acknowledges; they fabricate trust where there is none, even or especially when the beholder knows that the photos cannot be trusted.” Nothing can be trusted in Fake Accounts—not even photographs, not even realism.
It’s appropriate, then, that the novel ends and we wonder how much of it we trust. After all, we know the narrator is a pathological liar. Following her own whims, we see her make up personas for her dates based on the zodiac, lie to the family she babysits for in Berlin about being an accountant, and regularly deceive people who seem only to want to be friends. The narrator wants us to wonder about how we read her, but it’s not that she’s an unreliable narrator—or not only an unreliable narrator. Fake Accounts pushes us to reflect on our regular experiences with conspiracy, the ways we regularly read people with deep suspicion. We excise meanings from curt emails, pre-date chatter, a like on Instagram. If interpretation is detective work, then we do it all the time. We’re complicit. Contemporary conspiracy is everywhere and we’re just as bad as the narrator. From dating apps to talking about ourselves to social media presence, we also reinvent ourselves, regularly packaging ourselves for consumption. How do you know what’s real? Don’t waste your time, Fake Accounts suggests.