The narrator’s boyfriend, Felix, makes her look saintly by comparison. As such, she teeters on the verge of cliché, though many clichés do have basis in fact. Oyler’s unnamed protagonist, a young, fretful New Yorker, introduces herself immediately after the aforementioned list with the disclaimer: ‘I didn’t believe all this, necessarily.’ She’s afflicted with a kind of terminal self-awareness – ‘I would probably insult you in bed and call it feminist’ – that should ring true to anyone who’s attended a liberal arts college in the last ten years. It seems like ‘the world ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy …’ The question isn’t whether these are the best or worst of times, but whether they’re the worst or plain bad.ĭistinguishing bad from worst – deciding whether this is hell or merely purgatory – is very much the subject here. Donald Trump has just defeated Hillary Clinton. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021) – a novel set mostly in Berlin and Brooklyn, and peopled by the young adults who drift between them – begins with a contemporary update of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
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