Berlin Got Blurry
Image courtesy of Mike Kotsch
I first happened upon Ms. Oyler as she mocked a bunch of frat boys in some kind of video report for Vice. The quest to understand the value of identity, particularly racially, will shape the legacy of all those ghastly Trump years. Smart creatures like Oyler, with the sponsorship of organizations like Vice, journeyed down society’s cracks: to determine whether the folks people said they were online were the folks they were IRL.
Some of the most innocuous things we do on the Internet — deign to upload profile pictures of our actual selves, for instance, or form geopolitical viewpoints off five-minute scrolls down newsfeeds — grew so large in consequence that publishing went ahead and ignored the conventional wisdom: that it’s usually a bad idea to write (and naturally publish) a novel whose key events take place on smart devices. This might be meaningless now, post-pandemic. We’ve had no choice but to presume and cultivate digital identities, so what Oyler’s interested in is what’s left of your humanity, your individualism, and whether you’re fit to take part in (for instance) cancellation parades, the next big social correction, à la #BLM or #MeToo, or (heck) democracy itself.
The most fascinating conversation in Fake Accounts happens towards the end of the novel, when two American women in Berlin differ on the subject of what they personally owe victims of sexual assault. They’re two modern women, after all, with at the very least the power to broadcast opinions instantly. Our unnamed narrator has spent much of the novel delivering fake accounts (ha ha) of herself to dates, new acquaintances, her roommate, as a sort of recoil action against the revelation of a dead boyfriend; who totally unbeknownst to her was a decently-followed conspiracy theorist, it turns out. She now finds herself, over coffee, outraged by the intellectual privilege of a contemporary who believes it’s something to simply heart and retweet and forward things online as performances of solidarity. When Nell then posits that she’s actually stopped reading the news, because she’s learning to bake bread and would rather listen to ‘the ocean’, this is the privilege our narrator says she’s chosen to disregard entirely.
“Did my eyes widen? Did I look around to see if anyone had heard her? I don’t know. I thought of the babies, blinking on the phone, and had the strange experience of wanting to hold one right then, which I took to be an indication not of my innate yearning for children but of my innate yearning for an interaction that made immediate sense.”
Our narrator is engaged in two streams of dialogue: with airy Nell, in her flowery dress and rainbow-laced tennis shoes, and with her own hypocrisies. She has talked herself into a part-time gig as a baby-walker for a lady called Genevieve, who she has convinced she is a tax accountant and not a disenchanted blogger from New York (with the societal cache to simply uproot herself to Berlin). Oyler has her police these self-contradictions all throughout the novel, which is not headed anywhere specific and functions more as a series of litmus tests — on how far a person can go just fabricating versions of themselves, with no basis whatsoever in truth.
A lack of plot is perhaps not the issue if Oyler can disguise a disinterest in drama, intrigue, with such structural panache. But the book’s focus on social media and its detriment to the self does cause it to go round constantly in algorithmic circles. Every time her dispassionate narrator dares say something, presume anything, she checks herself for political incorrectness or emotional excess — the way (say) a trained journalist for Vice might. So every time you refresh the feed, by turning a page, nothing dangerous happens … because this protagonist is built to resist change and revolution with her cynicism and lethargy, for the benefit of the civic exercise in play. You can’t help but think, If I’d actually wanted to read an accurate description of what it’s like to launch a social media app, vapidly interact with all manner of nonsense and then feel guilty about it, hell — I might have just launched a social media app.
It takes many, many pages for Fake Accounts’ narrator to have a genuine moment with herself, with her facade. When Oyler finally allows her to allow herself a smidge of illiterate joy, with some unplanned biking towards a film screening, I could almost believe this was the point. Maybe purity, even in solitude, is a difficult thing to come by. But then again so is balance, and this book ultimately suffers for Oyler sheltering her heroine far too long from any IRL fallout.
If this is a book about identity, and it is, the real conceit of it is the idea that simply changing countries, and not speaking the native tongue, might just enable one to craft and manipulate an existence that’s impossible to interrogate. Sure — but what’s the point of fictionalising that?
