Fake Accounts - Lauren Oyler [Review]

Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts” starts with a woman discovering that her boyfriend is secretly a right wing conspiracy theorist who has been privately running a popular anonymous social media account dedicated to this. We watch as the unnamed protagonist, following her discovery, explores the vast and numerous online conspiracy theorist circles, delving deeper into the cults and their web of deception and slowly spiralling out of control as she tries to come to terms with, and ultimately understand the reasons why/how, her boyfriend found himself in such a position.

Well, at least that’s what I was hoping for. In reality this book was completely oversold and totally underwhelming. It would be around this point that I would issue a spoiler alert, but this book is so utterly devoid of any plot that it’s simply not necessary — there is nothing to spoil.

I honestly can’t stress enough how much this book is about nothing, how little this book is about anything. About a third of the way through this book I asked on Instagram for people to give me reasons to carry on. They didn’t help me; every single message I received was either someone wishing they had DNF’d or someone who had done. I don’t believe it would be fair for me to review a book if I haven’t at least given it the courtesy of reading it all the way through so my motivation to continue was almost entirely so I could write this.

Firstly there is not really as much tech or social media talk as expected, apart from the occasional mention of tumblr, tinder, or bumble, where you think “hey, I know what that is!” I’m not sure who this is aimed at then; many reviewers say the target audience is millennials and social media addicts, so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself reading an explanation that blue ticks mean a message has been read while grey simply means it has been delivered. If this is aimed at social media users and millennials is this really needed?

I was initially eager to read this, but it wasn’t exciting to read. For a 272 page book this was genuinely exhausting. The entire piece is unfortunately self absorbed, with every thought undeservingly noted, unedited, like a teenagers diary. She affords her every thought the importance that it simply does not deserve. At times this read as ordinary fiction, at other times it read as a memoir or an essay. In essence this is its downfall, it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be - it wanted to be everything and anything, with the writers inner monologue published unedited for the world to fawn over. It has the hallmarks of trying desperately to meet an essay word count, and reminded me of that one episode of Friends where Joey uses a thesaurus to change literally every word of a letter to appear clever (Antipodean? Really?). The synopsis mentions the protagonists “wit” and reviewers have described her quips as funny, indeed the only time I laughed was when I read on page 206, without a hint of irony, that “sometimes things feel like they’ve been going on for ages but really it’s only been about forty pages”.

In general this book is just very wordy, in content and style; sentences and paragraphs drag on for an eternity with limited punctuation at times, and the general formatting style is erratic. There is also so much needless information, so many details mentioned and so many characters introduced. I initially tried to remember everything, understandably assuming that it was all relevant to the story. Then I realised something; how could it take me so long to notice? There is no story.

The consistent message throughout the book is that people are dishonest online. Great, thanks for letting me know in the longest most drawn out way possible before hammering the point home with stories of online dates you’ve been on where you pretend to have a different zodiac sign each time. I don’t need reminding that people lie online after the amount of 5 star reviews I’ve read of this book.

This synopsis promises a “series of bizarre twists”. Today I learnt series means two; one of the twists bears no real relevance to the story, it is a useful plot point that is addressed but never utilised. As twists go, the second of the two is on par with “and then she woke up and it was all a dream”.

I asked on Instagram if anyone had any tips for writing scathing reviews without seeming rude, as I felt a little bad when I read that the unnamed protagonist was allegedly based on the writer herself, and in the following sentence I will deploy one of the more common suggestions I received; this book may not be for me, and I am willing to accept that I am simply incapable of understanding its genius.