The set-up sounded intriguing: a young woman finds that her partner has secretly been posting to conspiracy theory blogs, which seems entirely alien to who she believes him to be. This leads into an investigation and analysis of how people’s on-line lives and real lives interact, the role of truth and lies in our lives today and so on. This is at the core of much of modern existence and should have been intriguing. In fact what I got was an extremely wordy internal monologue, largely consisting of an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness as the narrator spends hours on-line, falls for her partner, Donald Trump is elected, she eats and buys stuff she probably shouldn’t...and so on. Frankly, after I’d waded through the best part of 100 pages of this (it felt like far more) with no sign of the promised analysis, I lost the will to carry on.
Lauren Oyler writes well, but it’s all so diverse and diffuse that I found very little focus in the narrative. There is the odd pithy remark, like “some people on Twitter seemed to believe every problem could be solved with publicity,” which is neat but hardly a penetrating or original analysis. The publicity blurb tells us that, “Narrated in a voice as seductive as it is subtly subversive, Fake Accounts is a wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity and authenticity in the age of the internet.” I’m afraid I found the voice neither seductive nor subtly subversive and the claim that it’s very funny is funnier than anything in the book itself, which I found flat and tedious.
I’m sorry to be so critical, but I thought this was well-written but an unfocussed mess. I can’t recommend it.
(My thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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