Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
After finding out that her boyfriend is a popular internet conspiracy theorist and one other Bad Thing happening, the narrator of Oyler’s debut novel receives a small windfall, quits her job, and decamps to Berlin, where she first met said boyfriend. There, she attempts not to interact too much with actual Germans, checks her social media accounts, and at one point executes a 21st century social experiment by going on a variety of first dates, embodying the characteristics of a different zodiac sign each time. It goes poorly, because her dates are less interested in hearing about her (fabricated) inner self than they are about sharing their own. With scenes at the 2017 Women’s March and pitch-perfect descriptions of online interactions (“I watched a female writer, A, say disparaging things about another female writer in generalized passive aggressive terms; I was able to figure out the latter’s identity, B, by messaging…” etc), the effect of reading the book is akin to falling into an hours-long social media binge: maddening, revealing, addictive. A word to the wise: this book is likely to become a bat signal used by a certain kind of dude to ensorcell a certain kind of woman into dating him, probably on the very apps that the book so well dissects (likes reading: Trick Mirror, Sally Rooney, Fake Accounts). This narrator might call his bluff by quizzing him on why he likes the book, and to please provide quotations and a fact-based argument—or she might say that she herself doesn’t read books anymore, books are old news, everything she needs is on the internet, now.