What Moves The Dead, The Only Good Indians, Fake Accounts (cont'd)
two spooky times, one existentially weird time
Spoilers for Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler.
I finished reading Fake Accounts, a book which, ultimately, did indeed seem like a few different books that got crammed into one book and tried to get away with it by being self-aware about being a trendy bildungsroman. Not exactly successful in its efforts, but I found much more to like about its experimentation and its weirdness than in its failures. I read this for a book club and I did like this book, although my gf noted that my Goodreads review definitely made it seem like I did not like this book. Historically, I do tend to only be able to write about things that don’t work about books, which I’m trying to steer away from, although I definitely fall into the camp of liking a thing includes mulling over its flaws. The “flawed masterpiece” is a bit of a thrown-around-too-much joke now in the world of video game criticism, but also that does describe how I feel about this book. I also definitely did a bit of “I see all these negative reviews and therefore I am going to find what there is to like about this thing” while reading.
I mean, how exactly do you square:
Shit I liked:
A story (mostly) about two weird liars who need to break up, but instead one of them dies
The writing was very funny
Lightly post-modern: the book is aware it is a book, the author is aware she is the author, the text is aware of the act of writing the text and the decisions made and not made going into that. Adds some interesting tension to the initial premise of the fake account, the mystery of why her boyfriend has this conspiracy theory Instagram account that doesn’t seem to align with any of his actual opinions or actions in real life, the nature of reality as an act of curation
The ending where it turns out the boyfriend faked his death
Shit I did not like:
A story (in practice) about two weird liars who need to break up, and the less interesting one of the two writes a book about online dating. The book seems to be at least half composed of personal essays that didn’t get run elsewhere (about being at the 2017 Women’s March, about online dating, about doomscrolling Twitter) jarringly forced into the narrative
The humor sometimes too self-aware which got grating, though your mileage may vary
Halfway through the book the narrator decides it’s a book about writing a book about online dating, possibly as a commentary on trends in fiction… for some reason
By the time the boyfriend’s faked death is revealed, we’ve learned so much about how deeply weird, what a pathological liar the main character is, and yet the book seems to have briefly returned to its initial premise that he doesn’t really seem all that important anymore. Or like the vast majority of the page count not about him wasn’t all that important, turning a sort of subverted Eat, Pray, Love into a woman whose story is defined by her shitty boyfriend anyway. It’s kind of a Gone Girl situation where they’re both revealed to be manipulators and one of them just got out-manipulated, except we didn’t spend half the book with one of them. He just shows up and no one apologizes and the book ends. We don’t really get much closure on what either one’s “deal” is, just that we spent the whole book with the one who was apparently up to less weird shit.
So, I dunno, how do you decide if that’s “good” and/or “enough”.
If it seemed obvious this was preeeeeetty self-inserty, I didn’t bother to verify this until finishing the book, writing this post, looking up the above image of the book and finding Clare Fallons’ “Can A Novel Capture How Badly The Internet Has Broken Our Brains?” verifying what I suspected:
Narrated by a nameless young woman who shares biographical details with Oyler — a stint working as a blogger for an edgy digital media company in New York, a stint living in Berlin, literary ambitions, etc. — “Fake Accounts” is a novel about how we shape our personas, online and off, and become neurotic, diminished creatures with no real self to call our own.
The specter of Oyler’s public persona — specifically, her often-brutal book reviews which tend to go viral in proportion to exactly how brutal they are — inevitably hangs over her debut novel, the critic made vulnerable to criticism herself. She doesn’t avoid this on the page; her narrator explains that she hopes to not only understand herself better through writing, but to “enchant an audience, promote certain principles I feel are lacking in contemporary literature, interpret events both world-historical and interpersonal (perhaps at the same time), etc.” If it would be impossible to separate Lauren Oyler, the critic, from the narrator and main character of Lauren Oyler’s novel, why not simply address it head-on and control the narrative?
Addressing anything, however, is a fraught act in “Fake Accounts.”
A thing I talked about a lot on Bad Books Good Times (although I’m recommending this book?) is how awareness of a thing isn’t sufficient for commentary on a thing, eg, if a character in a book cracks a joke that the events of the book are hard to believe, this doesn’t invalidate the issue that your book is perhaps a little off the rails. Around the time that Fake Accounts’ narrator wrote that her ex-boyfriends were looking forward to reading a different book by this point, my goodwill was pretty exhausted. (Again, I’m recommending this book? Idk, once you’re sick of the misadventures in Berlin, just skip to the last [second last?] section when we learn the boyfriend faked his death. It’d be an improvement on the experience.)
Completely unrelated, because that’s what the deal is here, I started reading What Moves the Dead (T. Kingfisher), which is 1) a queer retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (which I don’t remember a single detail of), 2) fun so far, has had at least one good scare so far not quite halfway through, if not 3) trying a bit too hard to be funny. A fair amount of the jokes are overwritten, which distracts, tonally, from the horror story, and just kind of feels a bit “we get it” when a self-deprecating joke hammers a little too hard. Although given this critique here in combination with my critique about Fake Accounts above, maybe this is a bit of a me problem.
I have a hard time with horror across mediums. I love horror movies to the point where they are inexplicably soothing to me and I write poetry about horror movies. I am a huge baby about horror video games – I cannot take an active role in the obvious “don’t go in there!” of horror. I don’t find horror books all that scary, although, in theory, I don’t see why this has to be the case. The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones) is my favorite book I’ve read so far this year, a horror novel that did manage to get me going "AHHH” (or something). Not sure why! Perhaps because:
I dislike body horror in film (yucky, does nothing for me) but on the page the detail can get me the right level of squeamish to buy into the compelling drive of horror
But also made me notice that horror, frequently:
has a sort of “point of no return” where you stop tensing up, because you’ve realized on some level that things have gotten so bad that there is no more pretense, there is no social recovery from this point onward.
Which is weird! Like, there’s something scarier about something happens and then a character with a normal life up to that point is about to kill than there is about something happens and then a character has a dead body in his home and there’s no way to hide it. We’re committed to a terrible bit now. Things are only going to rapidly get worse, and there’s a weird morbid glee in realizing you’re at that point in a horror story. Which could bring me around to how one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen is 2006’s Amanda Bynes vehicle She’s the Man, but I will not explain this further.