A Review of Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts

 

There are different ways to comment on Lauren Oyler’s novel  Fake Accounts. In this brief review I would like to pursue two of them.

 

The first way to approach Oyler’s book would be to simply quote three different sentences from the book.

 

The first way would be to simply quote three different sentences.

 

Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. (first line)

 

The cynical way he’d revealed his project was entirely self-promotional, a sure means to inflate the follower count on his new Instagram and drive people to his website, but the strategy could easily be folded into the entire statement as a criticism of the inescapable narcissism of social media. Or as a criticism of the appetite for passive destruction the internet promoted in place of engaged inquiry. (kindle location 3921)

 

The people at my yoga studio, which was on the more bourgeois side of my neighborhood, were primarily white women living in Brooklyn, and although I too was a white women living in Brooklyn, I of course did not identify as such, since the description usually signified someone welfish, lay, and in possession of superficial understandings of complex topics such as racism and literature. (kindle location 864)

 

A second way of commenting on Oyler’s book would be to simply say a word about the other books and texts, broadly understood, Fake Accounts reminds me of.

 

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This was published in February 2021, the same month as Fake Accounts. Lockwood’s book can also be seen as a novel about people who spend way too much time on social media, especially twitter.

 

 

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow is probably Bellow’s best book. Like Fake Accounts, it has a plot, but it foregrounds the discussion of ideas and goes on for pages about those ideas. Bellow was also frequently asked about how autobiographical his books were; Bellow pointed out that he would be a schizophrenic. Despite similarities between Oyler’s own life and that of the main character in Fake Accounts, I believe it would be a mistake to assume that they are the same.

 

 

The HBO (Max???) television show Girls was also a show about a white woman in her twenties living in Brooklyn navigating her life one poor decision at a time. At times, it became difficult to discern whether different plot elements are satire or autiobiography.

Fake Accounts begins with a relationship the main character and narrator, who is never named, realizes is deeply problematic because her boyfriend Felix has been secretly running an instagram conspiracy account. This discovery leads the character to pursue a series of what are, at least to me, questionable decisions.

 

 

Bojack Horseman is a unique television achievement. Among other things, the show is about white privilege (despite the main character being a horse) and how a self-absorbed washed up celebrity gets away with things that people who are not (former) white male celebrities would not be able to get away with. If ever there were a metaphor for toxic relationships, Bojack Horseman is it.

 

 

The movie Being John Malkovich is the story of a small group of people who are able to enter a portal into the mind of John Malkovich. Roger Ebert called it a movie with enough ideas for a half dozen films. Both Fake Accounts and Being John Malkovich are filled with kinetic and strange narrative ideas by the end, at least in my opinion.

 

 

 

I would suggest that very few people thought of Aristotle while reading Fake Accounts. But I believe his ideas are helpful in thinking about the ideas that Oyler brings up in her novel. Aristotle's Nichomacean Ethics is a book about how the pursuit of virtue leads to long term happiness (EUDAIMONIA). One virtue he spends quite a bit of time discussing is friendship; a discussion of the nature of friendship is the topic of books VII and VIII.

 

 

 

A commentary is essential when reading Aristotle, even for professional philosophers. A good one for the non-specialist is Edith Hall's Aristotle's Way: How ancient wisdom can change your life. Consider the following sentences and how they might connect to social media and friendship.

 

... Aristotle fascinatingly anticipates our modern notion of psychological projection. Immoral people can make shallow and transient friendships based on pleasure.... But they are incapable of primary friendships of any kind because they can’t trust anyone. The reason for their inability to trust anyone else is the important point: they measure other people by their own standards. Because they are motivated by selfishness or envy or a desire to win for its own sake, they can’t even imagine what it feels like to be inside another moral consciousness motivated by a desire for universal happiness.

 

The person who really loves you as a primary friend will happily tolerate it if you do not even know that they have done you a good turn. This is because their goal is NOT to prove anything to you, nor get something back in exchange, but simply YOUR own maximum happiness. Good parents feel this kind of altruistic love for their children. In fact, Aristotle thinks it is proper that “fathers love their children more then they are loved by them (mothers more so than fathers) and these in their turn love their children more than their parents.” He believes that the intensity of mother love is even greater than that which fathers have for children “for people estimate work by its difficulty, and in the production of a child the mother suffers more pain” (pgs 157-158).

 

I am aware that most humans do not spend their lives reading books and thinking about the pursuit of virtue. However, I would like to suggest that Oyler, in her book Fake Accounts has identified a problem with social media: that it distorts our ability to make meaningful connections to other humans. I would suggest that one way to begin moving toward a solution is by thinking deeply about the friends one has and the amount of work one puts into maintaining those friendships. The serious pursuit of friendship is an essential element in long term happiness.