Lauren Oyler is an American writer, very tall and very smart (or so I read). In 2021, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, a plotless story about a young woman not unlike herself who is, as they used to say, very online. But she’s best known, at least in the US, as a critic whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, and whose 5,000-word takedown for the London Review of Books of Trick Mirror, a collection of essays by another thirtysomething American writer, Jia Tolentino, reputedly went viral (I am unable to verify this, being not very online).
I always put these kinds of details in a review somewhere: if I didn’t, an editor would soon be in touch. But in this case, I’m getting them out the way early in order to give you, from the off, a sense of the rarefied niche into which we’re about briefly to wiggle. It is an airless place. If Jane Austen worked on two inches of ivory, Oyler’s territory is at once vast (the internet) and minute (her part of the internet). The very online – I would say the very, very online – may know all about her slightly defensive, periodically anxious and (at moments) hugely self-congratulatory style: an ironic, somewhat callow tone born of her addiction to what used to be known as Twitter. But for the rest of us, she brings in her wake (should we read her) the exhausting feeling of only half-knowing what – in truth, I mean who – she is on about.
