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Lockwood’s career has been tangled up in the internet even more than Oyler’s. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Ultimately, their answers sound nothing alike. They circle the same questions about how screens shape life and art. In this case, Fake Accounts and No One Is Talking About This show us two approaches to the same goal: the creation of a novel capable of capturing what the internet does to people. The books have thematic overlap so obvious that Oyler recently referred to them as “evil twins.” It’s a beautiful thing when two cultural products so flamboyantly twinned get released in tandem-like Dante’s Peak and Volcano, or Deep Impact and Armageddon, they make it easy to have conversations and debates. Poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, also a novel about a Twitter-obsessed young woman, comes out a few weeks after Fake Accounts. Oyler isn’t the sole extremely online author releasing a book about an extremely online protagonist this month. Good news, though! That’s not the only answer, or even a correct one.
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What is the internet doing to people, to books? The ultimate answer Fake Accounts suggests is: making them sour, and small. How strange, since Oyler’s criticism is clearly animated by strong feeling and a palpable sense of mischief. The characters filter their identities through screens, and this filtration allows for no depth, no emotional resonance. In Germany, she drains her days making up fake personalities for dates she lands online and ruminating about her deceased boyfriend.įake Accounts reckons with what fiction can achieve in the age of Twitter, but this reckoning, rather than enlivening the story itself, stifles it. The book follows the narrator’s move from Brooklyn to Berlin after discovering Felix’s duplicitous nature-he is secretly a semi-famous internet conspiracy theorist-and then, shortly after her discovery, hearing of his untimely death. Felix eventually moves back to the US, where they resume their relationship. It’s a book I’d expect her to flambé, had she not written it.įake Accounts is narrated by a blogger, unnamed but designed to loosely resemble Oyler (they share the same Twitter avatar and some basic biographical details), who relays the tale of her relationship with a prickly man named Felix, a charming, middling artist she meets when she’s on vacation in Berlin. Writers worry about getting reviewed by her, and they should worry, which is exciting. A critic one agrees with all the time-a critic who makes perfect sense-cannot possibly be interesting.) As Oyler describes herself, she’s an honest skeptic in a blurber’s world, a swashbuckler lunging to pierce marketing hype. (That’s the nicest thing anyone should say about criticism, by the way. Even when you don’t agree with or understand her arguments, they’re amusing.
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Oyler is a consistently entertaining critic.
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The review dripped with piss and vinegar it starts out, “I have always hated Roxane Gay’s writing,” and it doesn’t let up from there. She had her first big social media hit when she reviewed Roxane Gay’s best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist for the blog BookSlut in 2014. Joining us today is Jessa Crispin (), author of Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. Also, remember to review and rate the podcast in Itunes: /us/podcast/champ…d1242690393?mt=2. Support the show and get double the episodes by subscribing to bonus episodes for $5/month at /champagnesharks.