FAKE ACCOUNTS

LAUREN OYLER 4th Estate, 267pp, £12.99

Lauren Oyler is an American critic best-known in this country for being rude about the novels of literary darling Sally Rooney. Reviewing Fake

Accounts in the New York Times, Kevin Powers paid tribute to Oyler’s ‘perceptiveness and bracing disregard for the niceties of literary politicking’.

So how does Oyler’s first novel stand up to critical scrutiny? Set in 2016, in early-trump times, the narrator, spying on her boyfriend’s phone, finds he has a secret life as an online conspiracy theorist. Following his sudden death she decides to create a range of new online identities to try out on dating websites. Powers wrote: ‘It’s a brilliant comic novel about the ways in which the internet muddles all of our interior rivers while at the same time polluting the seas of the outer world, and about

A ‘wryly funny satire on the banal sociopathy of online life’

how these processes might be one and the same thing.’

In the Sunday Times, Houman Barekat enjoyed ‘a sharply observed and wryly funny satire on the banal sociopathy of online life’. Only James Marriott of the Times was unconvinced. ‘Oyler’s true subject is not internet conspiracy, but our cultural preoccupation with “authenticity”, especially the fashionable kind of literary authenticity that is prone to loading mundane reality with massive subjective emotional burdens.’ The kind in fact to be found in the novels of Sally Rooney – which Marriott concluded may, in the end, be braver.