Even her seamless relocation to Berlin after Felix’s death, undoubtedly demonstrating a lot of privilege, conveys an eerie sense of cancel culture always lurking about, waiting for an empty acknowledgement to set the record straight: “I had no real problems. While the protagonist is intensely analytical, her hermeneutics does not extend much beyond theoretical interpretation and awareness of modern-day global issues, as if to repress the overwhelming ideal of individual goodness. “Though she could rest on her morals, a good person is always trying to do better-not in a capitalist, life-hacking way, but in terms of acknowledging and improving the lives of others.” As the notorious meme goes: We don’t do that here. Oyler rejects the ubiquitous need for moral correctness that permeates today’s writing she does what she preaches and throws the dichotomy of good/bad personhood out the window has left the chat), precisely by letting her character passively ingest this outrageous information without attempting to unpick her boyfriend’s motives and be vocal about her disillusionment. There is no burning need for justice in Oyler’s main character if anything, Felix is dismissed as “beyond the pale” and not worth the labour of understanding. Compulsively checking the profile for new posts, the act becomes more of an automatic tic of curiosity than a righteous addition of fuel to the fire. You know this is a mere iteration, a mockery of performative do-gooders, especially when she decides to, instead, make him some pancakes, elaborating on the venture of buying ingredients for about as long as she entertained different imaginary scenes of confronting the problem.

She visualizes dramatic kick-outs or sly account infiltrations, all offering her a “chance to be purely and entirely the good one”. At first, the discovery of her boyfriend’s secret alt-right conspiracy Instagram account indeed sparks determination within her, as she is “overtaken by a sense of purpose” to excavate and shatter Felix’s online persona. The young protagonist of Fake Accounts describes herself as “a toxic presence”, spends a finger-joint-crushing amount of time on social media, and to further mark out her self-involvedness, is writing an autofiction book. Yet, unlike many other potentially poisonous presences in contemporary writing, she does not seek to redeem herself through arriving at an overused novelistic entelechy.

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