Pegging, by Udith Dematagoda

Udith Dematagoda Reviews Lauren Oyler's 'Fake Accounts'

The Germans hardly appear in Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, which is mostly set in Berlin, aside from as the subject of some shop-worn clichés and jokes. One wonders who her intended reader is. Jonathan Meades once observed that it was a taste for the communal and the compulsory that had proved so historically perilous to the German national character. In extending this analogy to the contemporary American character, we need only change compulsory to voluntary. We would, however, be forced to concede that thanks to social media - we’re all in some ways American. Most activity that was once solitary has become communalized, most opinions and ideas are now crowd-sourced, and as a result, most forms of artistic production, particularly within the vein of official culture, must first be vetted and subjected to the collective red pencil of mediocrity before it is released into the world. All of this must be succumbed to, voluntarily.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in contemporary literature, which survives through the foisting of a banal consensus upon a bewildered but ultimately disinterested reader, who nonetheless volunteers to be condescended to. The books which are produced and promoted relentlessly are aggressively middlebrow, deterministic, unchallenging despite their occasional claims of dealing with ‘difficult’ subject matter, and entirely forgettable. As a critic Lauren Oyler occasionally showed promise in exposing some of the innumerable shortcomings of such works, their authors, and the inflated reputations they have acquired through the collusion of publishers, editors, journalists and influencers. In writing Fake Accounts, however, she has failed to assert any form of aesthetic or ideological discontinuity between those works and her own. In attempting to critique a vapid contemporary culture, her writing proves oblivious to the fact that what makes this culture uninteresting is that it remains so stylistically and artistically bereft.

Communal voluntarism has figured heavily in the modern American conception of literary education. It is, after all, the originator of the quixotic but nonetheless lucrative notion that writing can be taught in the classroom, through collaboration, consensus, as a form of group therapy - that it is a skill to be imparted and learned rather than one acquired through various forms of experience; literal, philosophical, amorous, artistic, psychological, pathological. Much of this experience can be acquired vicariously through reading, which provides both an intuitive knowledge of the complex systems which underpin literary production and an unparalleled insight into the mechanics of sublimation. But people only pretend to read, these days.

This is very much a book for people who pretend to read. If the writing in Fake Accounts cannot be said to originate specifically from those creative writing programs, which the author apparently disapproves of, it is nonetheless a product of that distinctly American pedagogical miasma which is apparent in numerous guises within an increasingly congested digital landfill. Such a style (dry, cloyingly familiar, desperately grasping for profundity) is, I suspect, intimately connected to those expository writing classes taught in most American colleges. Nevertheless, it has since gone native throughout the digital sphere, developing its own logic, forms of expression and exegesis. For want of a definitive definition, it is relatable reportage for the uninspired and uninformed – ‘smart’ writing for stupid people. It is communicated in the serviceable style of the competent grammarian, distinguished only by the occasional and undeserved bon mot plucked arbitrarily from the synonym function of Microsoft Word, and placed into an otherwise unremarkable sentence. In short, it is the style favored by the majority of millennial opinion columnists and contemporary journalists. It is a style which Oyler clearly learned in the classroom (where she was no doubt a straight A student) and which she must have honed while working for VICE magazine. It has become the go-to style of those former bloggers who have evolved into the obedient media functionaries of our dull political status quo, and have subsequently come to style themselves as cultural arbiters. Despite her contrarianism, this is an environment that Oyler has some experience of, having ghost-written the memoirs of an Obama era political operative and VICE magazine executive whom she thanks in her acknowledgements. It is also a style, she may well counter, that she is parodying in Fake Accounts…which would only be plausible if it were at all possible to distinguish one of her own that exists in opposition.

The narrative follows a young woman who sneaks a look at her boyfriend’s phone and finds out that he has been running an anonymous conspiracy theory account on Instagram. It is 2016, and Donald Trump has just been elected President – a detail that Oyler wants us to believe consequential. Other than a tame satire of the DC Women’s March, the significance of the dawning of the Trump era is not developed beyond a nebulous association with impending doom. This holds true despite the many pseudo-profound aphorisms such as this one, evidently created with the review blurb in mind:

The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere: we were transitioning from an only retrospectively easy past to an inarguably more difficult future; we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad.

So, having found out her boyfriend (a handsome and hapless idiot - such a man!) this woman (seemingly attractive, witty, sarcastic – let’s call her Lauren Oyler) immediately wishes to break up with him. No real attempt is made to understand the reasoning behind his anonymous online presence, nor what the substance of these actual conspiracy theories are. Given that we are currently living (for better or worse) through an efflorescence of conspiracy theory populism, this lack of curiosity is odd – but telling. His views are simply given to be ‘beyond the pale.’ One wonders again…who her intended reader is. This narrative conceit, like many others, is flimsy at best but may have proved mildly interesting had it been developed further. However, before she can break up with her boyfriend, he dies suddenly in a biking accident in upstate New York. She then moves to Berlin, and goes on numerous OK Cupid dates, making up a series of rather dull alternate personas (fake accounts!). She doesn’t speak German, which provides ample opportunity to fill some pages. Despite her lack of German, she uses the term Weltschmerz in such a casual and clunky way that, had she been the object of their obsession, it would surely have led many a suicidal Teuton to reconsider their amorous derangement. Along the way, she meets an annoying and inevitably stern and humorless German roommate, an annoyingly ‘woke’ and self-absorbed hot-girl zoomer from LA, an annoyingly creepy (unconvincingly) British bookshop owner, and several other annoying people who I seem to have forgotten. One of them is annoying because he’s polyamorous, and I remember this only because he’s called ‘Bergman’ despite being Australian with parents of Scottish and Korean origin. She doesn’t have sex with any of them. (The book is curiously sexless, even in its depiction of sex acts). It eventually transpires that her boyfriend isn’t dead, and has faked his death: an utterly astonishing denouement which seems to come out of nowhere. Much of the book is recounted in a sardonic first-person tone that is reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City. I don’t believe this to be intentional, but it does imbue the narrative with a certain kitschy quality which Oyler can’t seem to shake, despite the self-conscious attempts at introducing ‘experimental’ elements and ‘interesting’ stylistic flourishes which one supposes serve some recondite parodic function. If they do, the source material scarcely seems worthy of parody. One attempt at a consistent leitmotiv is an imaginary chorus of ex-boyfriends who judge her every ill thought out action, which seems improbable for a character who cares so little for her boyfriends, and their opinions, that she would break up with them over some anonymous shit-posting.

Lauren Oyler’s criticism was perhaps at its best when pithily criticizing the ‘moral obliviousness’ of a writer like Jia Tolentino, the anodyne sentences of Sally Rooney or the clunky prose of Roxane Gay. In retrospect, this may not have been as daring as it appeared. The principle difficulty lies only in being granted a platform through which to express those unwelcome opinions, which are bad for the business of books more than anything. These platforms are jealously guarded, after all. However, they do require the semblance of balance, although none exists. This is where a critic such as Oyler comes in, a ‘contrarian’ and officially sanctioned opposition. The appeal of writers such as Tolentino, Rooney and Gay (among many others) derive from their ‘relatability’, which compensates for a lack of any distinguishable style. Contemporary literary culture heavily favors the former, and is vehemently opposed to the latter. Contemporary readers don’t like to feel like they are stupid, despite knowing deep down that they are. But one of the purposes of good literature is to inculcate a feeling of insufficiency (of knowledge, of experience, of the ineffable) which compels development. It isn’t merely to provide succor. This why it was once acceptable to simply describe a piece of literature as ‘improving’ without any need for further explication. Oyler's criticism sometimes seemed to concur – and where it was at times brilliant was in highlighting the paucity of improvement offered by contemporary books, which seek only to be lauded for their adherence to correct opinions and mores. In attempting her own foray into fiction, Oyler needed only to write in a way that was distinctive and stylistically anathema to the expectations of most readers; to challenge them, to shake them from their complacency. She had, after all, been granted a platform to do so. Instead, she panders to them. So who then is her intended reader?

Fake Accounts on occasion demonstrates brief echoes of potential, particularly in its observations regarding the self-serving and increasingly compromised nature of American liberal feminism. In one recollection, her conspiracy theorist boyfriend asks about her sexual fantasy. She replies that she wants to peg him while he reads the manuscript of her novel. Within this one image, the entire shaky edifice of a certain mode of centrist liberal feminism is encapsulated; the entitled fantasy of power and domination coupled with the conflicted yet insatiable need for validation and approval. But this brilliant image, and its numerous inferences, is deployed only in passing, timidly, and ultimately left undeveloped. One feels this is out of an abundance of caution, or perhaps deference. Inevitably then, as much as she may have hoped to distinguish herself, her writing rests on the lazy assumption that a slight modification of ideas is sufficient in and of itself to elevate her novel above a plethora of others written by the journalist-novelists of official culture. Consequently, her fleeting psychological insights into technological alienation are wanting; mere truisms that would have been better served by an essay of two thousand words, instead of the two hundred odd pages of this vaguely amusing novel. Both essay and novel would have read the same, in any case.

Communal voluntarism is the primary symptom of the forms of technological alienation that Oyler attempts to critique. But one must opt into social media, one must choose to participate in that collective hysteria and infantilizing onanism. Her implied position, that existence within this sphere is unavoidable, that we must find some form of accommodation with it despite the pathologies it induces - is difficult to accept. More so, since it appears to have served her so well - her critique of internet culture and social media seems disingenuous. That she ultimately fails in her endeavor of immanent critique can be ascribed to her inability to transcend social media’s lexicon, its forms of expression, and the insipid style it has birthed. She seems far too comfortable within its prosaic and uninteresting epistemology.

According to Katie Kitamura, who reviews the book for the New York Times, Fake Accounts is packed ‘with references to contemporary writers, from Ben Lerner to Jenny Offil.’ Apparently this is a selling point. Another appears to be its ‘lacerating humor’, or its underlying tone of ‘extreme disquiet.’ I was curious if we had read the same book, if I had perhaps missed something, or had been overly harsh in my appraisal. I realized eventually that one of the references in Fake Accounts that Kitamura recounts, with some satisfaction, is to her own book. (I seem to have forgotten the title). Of course most literary criticism and reviews these days are thinly disguised advertorial. There is, however, something to be learned from this blatant quid pro quo. To exist within the media milieu that Oyler belongs to, is to be comfortable within a certain consensus, to operate within the defined limits of accepted opinion, and to write in a way that is both intelligible, and above all, acceptable to those whom you are ostensibly criticizing. This is why, despite her putatively antagonistic opinions against some writers favored by the publishing and journalistic establishment, her own fictional work has been dutifully and charitably reviewed in all of its major organs.

Indeed, Oyler is writing for the benefit of this establishment: these are her readers. It is an establishment that clearly wields a great deal of influence and power, but one which will remain irremediably philistine because its terminal concerns are commercial as opposed to artistic. It will only ever be in conversation with itself. Consider that in Fake Accounts an unelaborated reference to The Idiot (apparently beloved by ‘literary types’) can confidently be assumed to be neither an allusion to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most tortured and personal novel, nor to Iggy Pop’s first and best solo album – but to an unremarkable novel written in 2017 by Elif Batuman about an undergraduate at Harvard. One feels it’s a reference familiar only to a certain type of contemporary bourgeois reader. It is, I suspect, also the type of reader that can only relate to the idea of Berlin in opposition to the idea of New York (as it is now). Berlin is posited merely as the latest outpost of an American Outre-mer, an increasingly seamless and linguistically accommodating proxy for Williamsburg located in what even the most professedly cultured among them may secretly admit to thinking of as one country, ‘Europe.’ The furtive and tortuous appeal of Berlin for many had once been its dissipation and visible abjection, which held much attraction for the artistically inclined. Much like New York in the 1970s, Berlin was a place where no decent bourgeois wanted to live; a degenerate cesspool of crime, drugs, and excess in stark contrast to the markedly staid nature of most other German cities and regions. This was its draw. That edginess has long since been superseded. Berlin is still cool, in a manner of speaking, but as many of its denizens will readily admit, what makes it steadily less so is precisely the influx of well-to do ‘cool’ Americans, and the rich tech nerds, graphic designers and start-ups that have followed in their wake. In other words, people who don’t seem to understand the axiomatic and timeless proposition that coolness is predicated on scarcity – that if everyone is cool, then no one is. These are the type of people who are the focus of Oyler’s Berlin scenes, which coincidentally are the novels most cringeworthy.

‘But I’m not cool!’ - Oyler may perhaps self-deprecatingly protest, as she also does in myriad ways within her novel. In doing so, however, she assumes a facile knowing attitude towards those hackneyed caricatures of ‘cool’ that populate her novel. She is somehow above such coolness, and is thus (we have no choice but to assume) much cooler than ‘cool.’ It is that insouciant narcissism which Orson Welles observed so tersely in Woody Allen, who Oyler’s protagonist (and her author, since there is not attempt at differentiation) affects not to like, but is clearly very much indebted to. ‘Like all people with timid personalities’, Welles maintained, Allen’s ‘arrogance is unlimited.’ He ‘hates himself, and he loves himself.’ Everything he does on screen is ‘therapeutic.’

British elitist nepotism and the American variety were previously distinct, but this distinction is now of vanishing significance. One need only look to the increasingly intertwined trans-Atlantic Anglophone media to be convinced of this. It serves only the interests of a certain class and its supplicating aspirants. It seeks only a more diverse set of elites in order to indulge its superficial delusions of progress. It hardly needs to be said that the machinations of this cultural establishment are now glaringly apparent. It no longer affects any form of noblesse oblige, nor makes any real attempt to disguise its bourgeois cultural protectionism. The most dull and uninteresting people have - by virtue of their wealth, influence, and education - forced themselves into what they believe to be cultural relevancy amidst the death throes of their hegemony. A cursory glance at the backgrounds of most heavily marketed young literary writers these days is sufficient; the right school, the right opinions, the right agent, the right target market. And it is for this reason, for example, that we don’t merely have one Irish writer of brave and honest feminist fiction about millennial sexual misery educated at Trinity College Dublin, but three (so far). The injunction of these processes is straightforward enough; these are the products of official culture, of official ideology, and it is your duty to merely consume without critiquing. Critique is tantamount to betrayal within this Weltanschauung.(which by the way is a German word). It is simply ‘beyond the pale.’ Upon reading Fake Accounts, there seems to be little that distinguishes Lauren Oyler from this culture, despite the vague promise within her criticism for some form of reckoning with the failings of this desolate literary landscape. How unstoppably bad.