Culture

Two Paths for the Extremely Online Novel

Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This ask the same questions about the internet. Their answers sound nothing alike.
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Photograph: Roc Canals/Getty Images

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“Why would I want to make my book like Twitter?” the narrator of Lauren Oyler’s new novel, Fake Accounts, wonders. “If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter. You’d be surprised how much time you can spend on Twitter and still have some left over to write a book.”

Oyler knows about Twitter. She had her first big social media hit when she reviewed Roxane Gay’s best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist for the blog BookSlut in 2014. The review dripped with piss and vinegar; it starts out, “I have always hated Roxane Gay’s writing,” and it doesn’t let up from there. Oyler is a consistently entertaining critic. Even when you don’t agree with or understand her arguments, they’re amusing. Which is to say, she isn’t boring. (That’s the nicest thing anyone should say about criticism, by the way. A critic one agrees with all the time—a critic who makes perfect sense—cannot possibly be interesting.) As Oyler describes herself, she’s an honest skeptic in a blurber’s world, a swashbuckler lunging to pierce marketing hype. Writers worry about getting reviewed by her, and they should worry, which is exciting. High standards are a critic’s gift. Her first novel is surprising, then. It’s a book I’d expect her to flambé, had she not written it.

Fake Accounts is narrated by a blogger, unnamed but designed to loosely resemble Oyler (they share the same Twitter avatar and some basic biographical details), who relays the tale of her relationship with a prickly man named Felix, a charming, middling artist she meets when she’s on vacation in Berlin. Felix eventually moves back to the US, where they resume their relationship. The book follows the narrator’s move from Brooklyn to Berlin after discovering Felix’s duplicitous nature—he is secretly a semi-famous internet conspiracy theorist—and then, shortly after her discovery, hearing of his untimely death. In Germany, she drains her days making up fake personalities for dates she lands online and ruminating about her deceased boyfriend.

The narrator, whose day job requires rewriting the news with snarky jokes sprinkled in, laces her story with pithy social commentary, often targeting the easily targeted Brooklynite media class. (“I lived with a roommate in a rent-stabilized apartment in Bed-Stuy and wore shitty clothes even though I’d earned enough to buy oddly proportioned fancy ones,” she explains.) She brims with riffs that wouldn’t be out of place in Oyler’s criticism: opinions about astrology, moralism in contemporary literature, millennials who complain about their class position but nonetheless blithely order $13 cocktails. Zingers abound.

While capable of efficiently roasting her cohort, the narrator’s aim wavers when she tries to explain herself. She has an intensely prescriptive approach to her own personality; she is constantly telling us what kind of person she is, particularly in comparison to her peers. She goes to a pub crawl in Berlin, insisting she’s not the type of person who would do so. (Well then, why does she?) She attends the Women’s March, but takes pains to paint herself as less embarrassingly sincere than the pussy-hat wearers she troops alongside. She finds her fellow New Yorkers insipid for all sorts of reasons, including their fondness for the city where they live. (“I’d never really cared about New York the way other people did,” she explains.) She’s not a regular Brooklyn media white girl, she’s a cool Brooklyn media white girl. Just watch her move to Europe! You get the sense she’s been so busy acting out ideas of herself for an imagined audience that she has no idea who she is.

The way the internet warps self-perception is a timely topic, and Oyler captures how exhausting it is to be constantly encouraged to ponder the type of person you’d like to appear to be. Fake Accounts is an effective portrait of someone who is too caught up in the performance of self to actually know herself, let alone anyone else. But it’s a one-dimensional portrait. No texture. By focusing so closely on the unrelenting inwardness of a shallow thinker, the book succumbs to a stultifying myopia; the narrator moves to Berlin but skims over the surface of expatriate life with total disregard for German culture, like Emily from Emily in Paris’ bad-tempered cousin with a personality disorder. It’s not a dupe for the experience of scrolling through Twitter, as the narrator feared, but something even worse: getting stuck on the profile of a particularly grouchy forum user.

The narrator’s estrangement keeps the reader at arm’s length; she has no recognizable authentic emotional reactions to the novel’s events, so it’s difficult to forget that she is a collection of postures and tics the author wanted to play with rather than, you know, a rounded character. She can be a bitch, which should be fun, but her bitchiness is mostly relegated to surly asides in her internal monolog, or mean-spirited observations about how she might delight in her acquaintances’ misfortune. Narcissists can be a great thrill to read about—but they’ve got to be dynamic, dammit. If American Psycho was a book about Patrick Bateman going on an extended vacation to think about his weird ex, it would also suck.

Gimmicks deployed as generously as zingers—a Greek chorus of ex-boyfriends chiming in here and there, a section written in an aphoristic style parodying trendy contemporary fiction, winks at autofiction—create noise, not meaning. There’s a twist in the final act that turns the protagonist’s listless mourning process on its head; or, rather, it would do this if Oyler hadn’t built a novel so lacking in a core. Instead, there’s nothing to meaningfully subvert. It packs the punch of an exposé on rigged carnival games. Who cares? We already knew it was bullshit.

Fake Accounts reckons with what fiction can achieve in the age of Twitter, but this reckoning, rather than enlivening the story itself, stifles it. The characters filter their identities through screens, and this filtration allows for no depth, no emotional resonance. How strange, since Oyler’s criticism is clearly animated by strong feeling and a palpable sense of mischief. There’s nothing palpable here. What is the internet doing to people, to books? The ultimate answer Fake Accounts suggests is: making them sour, and small.

Good news, though! That’s not the only answer, or even a correct one. Oyler isn’t the sole extremely online author releasing a book about an extremely online protagonist this month. Poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, also a novel about a Twitter-obsessed young woman, comes out a few weeks after Fake Accounts. The books have thematic overlap so obvious that Oyler recently referred to them as “evil twins.” It’s a beautiful thing when two cultural products so flamboyantly twinned get released in tandem—like Dante’s Peak and Volcano, or Deep Impact and Armageddon, they make it easy to have conversations and debates. In this case, Fake Accounts and No One Is Talking About This show us two approaches to the same goal: the creation of a novel capable of capturing what the internet does to people. They circle the same questions about how screens shape life and art. Ultimately, their answers sound nothing alike.

Lockwood’s career has been tangled up in the internet even more than Oyler’s. She might be the only person on Twitter everybody likes. In the early 2010s she gained an enthusiastic fan base for her series of vulgar, poetic “sext” tweets; her breakthrough moment came with the publication of her poem “Rape Joke” on the now-defunct blog The Awl in 2013. An autodidact homebody from the Rust Belt, Lockwood has never lived in New York or gone in for an MFA, and social media served as her main conduit into literary communities, where she has bloomed into appointment reading for both poetry and criticism in all the fanciest magazines.

Written in the aphoristic style Oyler needles in Fake Accounts, No One Is Talking About This also centers on an unnamed protagonist who resembles the author. Like Lockwood, she is a writer beloved for her witty online presence. The third-person narration describes the protagonist’s world in surrealist, deliberately estranging terms—the internet is “the portal,” for example—and the first half of the novel unfolds as a series of airy musings on what it’s like to spend your days scrolling through feed after feed. Because it’s written by Lockwood, the language is galloping and fun, although I suspect readers unfamiliar with meme culture will find it all but impossible to parse. Some of the passages closely echo Oyler’s riffs on contemporary foibles, except written in gnomic fragments. (E.g.: “Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.”)

Playfulness gilds each of these observations, but by the end of the book’s first half, I wondered what it could possibly have left to say. The narrator’s bawdy, excitable reveries were amusing enough, and the section floated along on its absurdist sentence-level strengths—it is fun to read—but the floaty quality drifted into weightlessness. How long could she riff about the inherent absurdity of the internet, exactly?

But I forgot: Lockwood’s a poet, and if there’s one thing poets see as essential, it’s a turn. Towards the end of her book’s first half, the protagonist’s internet poisoning is tempered with increasingly frequent interactions with her family, especially her pregnant sister. While her point of view is still feed-addled, she starts spending more time outside “the portal.” Instead of traveling around the world for internet culture conferences, the protagonist moves back home to help with the pregnancy, as the fetus develops abnormally and endangers her sister’s health. She unglues herself from her screen because life feels too real. “She stopped posting on the portal; she knew how it was,” she thinks. “Above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.”

The world beyond the internet dominates her thoughts. The protagonist screams at her pro-life father, she listens carefully to doctors, she worries desperately about the people she loves. After learning of a new law in Ohio that makes inducing a pregnant woman before 37 weeks a felony, she acknowledges the hard limits of what being perpetually logged on can achieve. “I’ll … I’ll … I’ll post about it!” she rages, and then does not. When confronted with a callous doctor, she deals with his behavior by filtering her anger through internet language: “Messy bench who loves drama, she thought, the words rising into her head like a warding spell, for whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these moments.” But she is not stuck inside her “portal” any longer.

This second half simultaneously builds on and knocks down what came before it. As it unfolds, the novel leaps from clever to moving, accumulating the gravity its first half sorely lacked; there are humans who care for one another sitting in the same room, there is the threat of loss, there are, finally, stakes. “For now, the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone,” Lockwood writes of her now-less-online lead.

Without its second half, No One Is Talking About This would be stymied by the same problem plaguing Fake Accounts: The internet is a vital part of contemporary life, and one worth exploring, but “girl goes online” is not a compelling narrative arc capable of sustaining a novel. The internet is a place, not a plot. Lockwood locomotes her story through her “portal” by giving her protagonist things to do and people to love.

I don’t mean to suggest the only way to effectively write about life online is to give characters something bigger to care about than their own identity, to throw their preoccupation with the screen into relief (although this tactic certainly works in No One Is Talking About This). Oyler’s project is a worthy one, although her execution wound up too bloodless. It may be old-fashioned, but I do still believe that old Faulkner adage about fiction, that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” Showing a human heart struggle against the slippery allure of the internet can be a meaningful path for a story. But readers still need to hear it beat.

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