Ironic, witty, and detached, the unnamed protagonist of this audiobook is very difficult to like, despite narrator Rebecca Lowman's outstanding depiction. As the country prepares for Donald Trump's inauguration, our protagonist snoops through her boyfriend's cell phone and discovers that he is a well-known social media conspiracy theorist. This kicks off a strange journey as we learn about their pasts, the evolution of their relationship, and how incredibly self-absorbed she truly is. The story aims at satire, but ultimately it is a harsh commentary on present-day millennials and their obsession with distorting their reality through the use of social media. While the story is somewhat drawn out, Lowman's narration is spot-on. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Fake Accounts
Narrated by Rebecca Lowman
Lauren OylerUnabridged — 10 hours, 14 minutes
Fake Accounts
Narrated by Rebecca Lowman
Lauren OylerUnabridged — 10 hours, 14 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “incisive” and “funny” debut novel that “brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved--he was always a little distant--and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.
Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?
Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age
Editorial Reviews
★ 10/26/2020
In Oyler’s bold debut, a blogger discovers her boyfriend is an influential online conspiracy theorist. A suspicion that the unnamed narrator’s withdrawn boyfriend, Felix, might be cheating leads her to find his anonymous social media accounts, which stoke alt-right sentiments as Donald Trump’s inauguration looms. The narrative flashes back to show the couple’s meet-cute in Berlin—he’s a tour guide, she’s a tourist—and their burgeoning long-distance relationship, which changes for the worse after he joins her in New York. Felix is a habitual liar, prone to inventing alter egos for himself and the narrator when meeting strangers, and initially she plays along, but soon longs for the real Felix. She resolves to break up with him, but first she travels to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., where she gets a phone call informing her Felix has died in a bike accident. Feeling adrift, she quits her job and moves to Berlin, where she leans into a lying life of her own—with the men she meets on dating apps, the mother of twins whom she nannies, even the German government. Oyler experiments with various forms along the way: there is a lengthy parody of fragmented novels, copious analysis of millennial internet habits, literary references from Dickens to Ashbery to Ben Lerner, a Greek chorus of ex-boyfriends, and direct address to the reader. Oyler wields all these devices freely, creating a unique, ferociously modern voice. This incisive, funny work brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world. Agent: Alia Habib, the Gernert Company. (Feb.)
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
Editors' Choice, The New York Times Book Review
Entertainment Weekly, A Best New Book of the Month
Esquire, A Best Book of the Year
Named a Most-Anticipated Book of the Year by Elle * Vulture * BuzzFeed * The Millions * Literary Hub * The Rumpus * Bustle * and more.
"This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it." —Zadie Smith
"Witty and self-aware." —The New Yorker
"[A] witty novel that captures a certain species of Internet life better than any other book I’ve read. A century ago New York City got Edith Wharton; now the World Wide Web gets Lauren Oyler. We're even." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Social media has lurked in the background of contemporary literary fiction . . . but here it feels, finally, fully and thoroughly explored, with style and originality . . . I felt sharpened by it, grateful for its provocations." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"An invigorating work, deadly precise in its skewering of people, places and things . . . Stylish, despairing and very funny, Fake Accounts . . . adroitly maps the dwindling gap between the individual and the world." —Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review
"[The] narrative voice will ring bells with fans of Oyler’s criticism. It’s confident, knowing, fond of putting on a performance and owning it." —Clare Bucknell, WSJ. Magazine
"This novel by my favorite living essayist starts with a tragedy and ends somewhere more ambivalent . . . Oyler makes it funny by allowing her fictional stand-in to look petty, vain, and selfish—like a real person." —Dan Brooks, The Atlantic
"Smart and dark . . . A pleasure to read and easy to inhale. The writer is brilliant, bringing to life a narrator with a penetrating gaze and a mordant, misanthropic voice." —Scott Stern, The New Republic
"Pitch-perfect descriptions of online interactions . . . The effect of reading the book is akin to falling into an hours-long social media binge: maddening, revealing, addictive." —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
"Full of brilliantly astute cultural criticisms . . . The premise may sound dark, but Lauren Oyler's delightfully wry, sharply observational prose turns the protagonist's pity party into a lively affair." —Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
"Oyler perfectly, cringingly captures the pseudo-worldly millennial hustler . . . [She] unravels—in a darkly comic novel that takes several satiric turns, including a memorable send-up of autofiction—the weighty, inescapable feeling of being online and never being able to log off, and the way we create fictional universes for ourselves." —Rachel Tashjian, GQ
"An absolutely brilliant take on the bizarre and despicable ways the internet has warped our perception of reality . . . Equal parts witty and deceptive, this is a startling critique of what we know to be true but struggle to accept." —Elle, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
"[A] ruthless depiction of the devastatingly alienated lives of downwardly mobile but not destitute 'creative' millennials . . . Oyler is a talented prose stylist, darkly funny at times, biting, clever. Her narrator’s observations of the world are crystal-clear and true." —Marianela D’Aprile, Jacobin
"One of the year’s sharpest debut novels . . . Told in our narrator’s seductive, incisive, and often deceptive voice, Fake Accounts is a ferociously smart dissection of the social media age, where we’re long on carefully-crafted fictions and short on truth."—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire, A Best Book of the Year
"Outstanding . . . You'll laugh, you'll groan, and like many subjects of Oyler's book reviews, you'll perhaps see more of yourself than you'd like to in her pages." —Jenny Singer, Glamour
"Without knowing it, I was waiting for this novel . . . Underneath the ruthless observations is someone who is clearly yearning for real connection—something difficult to find these days." —Emma Levy, The Seattle Times
"You’ll be charmed from the start by Oyler’s astute, slyly scathing take on living and dating in the Trump era." —Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Ambitious and accomplished, and quite funny." —Emma Sarappo, Washington City Paper
"Oyler is an extremely talented and insightful literary critic . . . and a lot of this book is a critique of both contemporary literary fiction and of the way we’re taught to think and speak by the larger media ecosystem." —Constance Grady, Vox
"Fake Accounts is exciting for its commitment to considering everything, to never glossing over." —Claire Fallon, HuffPost
“Oyler is as unsparing of those things she finds tedious and facile—fragmented novels, online performances, the glorification of navel-gazing—in her fiction as she is in her criticism, only in Fake Accounts she is able to have a new kind of fun with these critiques, to explore them more deeply by inhabiting and experimenting with them, and to reflect reality by recasting it as a kind of hyper-reality . . . Oyler wrote a contemporary novel that is reflective of the time, without participating in any of the unspoken, agreed upon ways to reflect this time: There is no undue catastrophizing, no moral posturing, there is just reality, believe it or not." —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29
"Fake Accounts takes place at the onset of the Trump administration. There are pussy hats. But the psychic rupture of the debut of the Trump times is backdrop for a story that is mostly about the effects of exposure to the Internet on the self . . . This is a portrait of a person made incredibly ill by the Internet. She may be going mad and trying to take us down with her." —Choire Sicha, The New York Review of Books
Ironic, witty, and detached, the unnamed protagonist of this audiobook is very difficult to like, despite narrator Rebecca Lowman's outstanding depiction. As the country prepares for Donald Trump's inauguration, our protagonist snoops through her boyfriend's cell phone and discovers that he is a well-known social media conspiracy theorist. This kicks off a strange journey as we learn about their pasts, the evolution of their relationship, and how incredibly self-absorbed she truly is. The story aims at satire, but ultimately it is a harsh commentary on present-day millennials and their obsession with distorting their reality through the use of social media. While the story is somewhat drawn out, Lowman's narration is spot-on. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
2020-10-27
A mordant take on postmodern mores.
Late one night, while her boyfriend sleeps, an unnamed protagonist goes snooping through his phone. She finds no evidence that Felix has been cheating on her, but she didn’t really suspect he was, and she wouldn't have cared much if he had been. Indeed, most of what she finds is utterly anodyne—until she discovers his anonymous Instagram account. Scrolling through screen after screen of conspiracy-theory memes, she discovers that Felix has instantly become a mystery to her. She also realizes that she should definitely dump him, which she’d been thinking about doing anyway. While she’s considering the most satisfying way to do this, circumstances rob her of the opportunity and send her into a bit of an existential crisis. This results in her quitting her job as a blogger and moving from Manhattan to Berlin. One way to describe this book is as a smart, often funny critique of a culture that rewards people for turning themselves into brands and encourages the incessant consumption and creation of content—and it is that. But it’s also a novel in which the reader is stuck inside the head of one very self-absorbed woman carefully analyzing the minutiae of weeks spent endlessly crafting new personae for dating apps and trying them out on the men who respond. One’s ability to appreciate this novel will depend entirely on one’s interest in spending a whole lot of time with its narrator. Her sharpness and seeming self-awareness are engaging at first. After explaining that she finds it unappealing to abandon all reason upon falling in love, she adds, “I believe it hurts the feminist cause. And, worse, makes me look personally bad.” Eventually, though, it becomes clear that her self-awareness doesn’t make her honest; it just makes her better at presenting a curated version of herself.
Not bad as social commentary. Not that great as a story.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177299372 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Videos
