Postmodern Paralysis and the Anxiety of Ironic Awareness
When all meta-narratives are assumed false, it becomes difficult to passionately tell meaningful standalone narratives too. A critical look at Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts.
In the modern and too self-aware post-modern and cripplingly confused post-post-modern era, there is a proverbial literary race to try and write the next great (American) novel. Given the obvious difficulty of the task and the dismal economic outlook of publishing and being a writer, various literary sub-cultures have carved out their own little literary lacunae. This allows the winners in these sub-cultures to hoard increasingly scarce literary status from within their largely fabricated niches. The boon for them is they get to LARP as a literary legends without having to go full Ahab hunting his white whale.
One of these niches is preoccupied with the psychology and social effects of being “very online.” This anxious, overdetermined question has been more or less forced on us by the ubiquity of the iPhone circa 2009 and regular discourse freakouts like The Great Awokening that have become a normal part of the social media age. Another important and exacerbating contributor to this literary quandary is post-modernism. As both an aesthetic mode and social phenomenon, the ideas of post-modernism have taken deep hold of authors who ask these question, and ostensibly, these questions deeply plague them. They’re worried that the stories they want to tell have been told before (they have), they’re worried they have no new ideas or stylistic contributions (they often don’t), and they’re worried that they will be mocked and parodied if they try to authentically assemble a meaningful and ambitious work of art (they probably will be). But these are anxieties inherent to being an artist or author. They shouldn’t be paralyzing. Contemporary authors should have the courage to run headlong at these questions, but most have chosen to batten down the hatches by layering their work with esoterica, ugliness, nostalgia, pastiche, and irony.
But we are now getting far afield of actually taking a closer look at a “very online” novel.
Of course, it’d be weird to claim that the inaugural work in this area actually proceeded the social dominance of the internet, but I think this is clearly the case. And what was great about this first entry and why it still endures somewhat today is that it was quite Ahabian. And yes, if you haven’t guessed it yet, I am talking about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (a novel of this ilk I’d unironically recommend). Unfortunately, DFW has become inimical to many of his literary descendants working in this or similar modes. In fact, the very online literary preoccupation has for whatever reason become more seductive to young female writers who feel alienated by the forces they see DFW as somehow emblematic of.
So today, we are graced with the likes of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. (Although potentially apocryphal, I am under the impression Oyler landed this book deal based on her snarky hot takes on Twitter - along with her being a known online blogger/writer of course. If I err, please disabuse me of this notion.) Fake Account isn’t a work devoid of creativity or intelligence, but it is nonetheless an empty and meaningless husk. And this is in large part because Oyler has trapped herself into a treasure hunt for fool’s gold by internalizing the nostrums of post-modernism and other associated ideas and memes like those arising from critical theory and philosophical feminism.
There isn't much in the way of plot to summarize for Fake Accounts as the work is voice-driven and primarily interested in social, psychological, and cultural commentary. However, the purported plot's impetus concerns the narrator's shocking discovery that her otherwise boringly normal and somewhat distant boyfriend Felix operates a fake Instagram account that purveys conspiracy theories despite having little to no traditional social media presence. This of course is set in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election and hence this realization is intended to provoke all the sinister associations many young, self-righteous progressives make among Trump, the alt-right, conspiracy theories, etc. Before the narrator can leave her boyfriend, he dies suddenly in a bicycle accident. In response to the ensuing emotional fugue, she absconds to Berlin, where we get the bulk of what Oyler herself calls - in a meta-acknowledgement - the “searching bourgeois-white-person narrative.” This consists of a lot of internal monologuing about the frustration of the unnamed narrator’s life, especially her dissatisfaction with a revolving door of app-accrued dating experiences with various niche male stereotypes.
Oyler is certainly a clever, entertaining, and intermittently self-deprecating writer, yet Fake Accounts is nonetheless a solipsistic work of empty calories - the literary equivalent of gorging on pints of Jeni's while binging Euphoria or trying to get kale chip dust out of your Landskrona's cushions while listening to Chapo Trap House. In some sense, Oyler recognizes this and is doing a cynical meta-commentary about how this is inescapable or at least superior to alternatives (e.g. actually living and enjoying a Bourgeois lifestyle). However, there isn't any amount of wit or irony or sneering that can transmute emptiness into meaning, feeling, or beauty. Is it really interesting, original, or meaningful that Oyler recognizes that mediation of social relationships via the internet can foster alienation, anomie, and ennui? Or that it encourages a lot of performative and meaningless nonsense, while obscuring the sub rosa cut-throat reputational and material war? Isn't Oyler’s Fake Accounts an ambivalent "dirtbag leftist" retread of a James or Austen novel for the internet age without the style, care, and attention of the aforementioned authors?
I think I'd be a periodically satisfied consumer Oyler's criticism of literary fiction or maybe her journalism, but her actual effort at literary fiction seems irrelevant. It is tantamount to scrolling the Twitter feeds of many over-educated, dissident left-wingers eager to impress their friends with cleverness or listening to the Red Scare Podcast on repeat (well probably not the current RedScarePod iteration) or trying to get something more than laughs out of Fleabag. The work is stuck in the same trap that the author's protagonist is caught in. Maybe this one should be read as a cautionary tale against foreclosing oneself to particular human experiences or modes of living because it is in vogue to consider them rapacious or reactionary.