The pithy one-liners and hollow self-criticism implicate it in the very matrix of pseudo-self-awareness that it claims to address. But the novel reads like something written specifically for the glamorous reception it amassed. Lauren Oyler attempts to unpack that illusion in her new novel, which received media hype and discussion among the millennial literary circle. Driven by the illusion of reality inherent to digital space, we are constantly spiraling into corners of the internet, losing touch with the world itself. Across politics and media, social interactions and online personas, irony seems to be the dominant trait of the 21st century, or at the very least the past five years or so. The observation is apt, if abrupt the narrator’s self-absorbed thoughts pause only for a moment. One of the best sentences in Fake Accounts stands on its own, separated from the narrator’s musings on dating apps and the 2010s: “At some point you have to admit that doing things ironically can have very straightforward consequences.”
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