This was a fun read! I think I finished it in fewer than five sittings. It’s written with a dry, sarcastic, sometimes flip, and very parenthetical style. So, if you don’t like long sentences with lots of punctation that force you to slow down and and reparse them, this book probably isn’t for you. The novel’s narrator and protagonist is presumably a fictionalized version of Oyler herself, given that we never learn her name and judging by all the call outs to “the ex-boyrfriends” who are supposedly reading along. She meets her boyfriend, Felix, while vacationing in Berlin. After dating for a year or so, she learns that, even though he claims no personal social media presence, he in fact runs a popular conspiracy troll account on instagram. She plans to confront him about this and break up, but he dies suddendly.
After this we follow along as she quits her job as a writer for a shitty website and moves to Berlin on a whim. Once there, we get to experience lots of situations that illustrate different kinds of fakery, many involving the internet in some way. There’s a really funny bit during this sequence where she dons a new personality for twelve dates with guys she meets on OK Cupid, each based on the meme-level traits of the astrological signs. This part also has a very different form than the rest of the book, a deliberate dig at a certain kind of author that overintellectualizes a lazy kind of writing. I thought this was funny enough, but I suspect it is an in-joke for industry people that went over my head.
After a few months in Berlin, and immediately after a somewhat tense period of applying for an extended visa, she learns that Felix performed the ultimate act of fakery, that of his own death. This is technically a spoiler, but I promise it won’t impact your enjoyment of the story. Felix’s reappearance is obviously a big scandal, and as part of his return he “launches” a full social media presence. In the final pages, the narrator runs into Felix at a cafe in Berlin and effectively closes the book by saying, about the caption on one image in his sparse new instagram grid, “That’s one of my tweets.” I don’t konw if petty is the right word for this scene, but it was definitely hilarious.
Oyler writes a lot of the dialog in this book in an interesting way. Words and thoughts from participants outside the narrator are all relayed in third person and filtered through her without quoting them directly and sometimes even paraphrasing what they said. For example when she’s getting dinner with a friend before the move:
This was where the evening began to turn bad. Jane leapt into earnest apologies— oh, no, she said, it actually wasn’t less significant, because the situation in the book was fictional and mine was real. So then I had to say no no no, it was just a joke, and besides things indeed could be a lot worse; mainly I was excited to go to Berlin.
Or on a date with a Relationship Anarchist:
Did this not put him in a disadvantageious position? They could abandon him at any time and have a stable understudy boyfriend waiting in the wings? He didn’t think in those terms. In fact, if he was being honest, he mainly spent time with non-RA, because it was just easier. He had a job, things to do— he relished intamacy and didn’t want to wait for people he liked to come around.
Or when she’s pretending to be a virgo:
Anyway, I said, I was a poet and a bartender, and I liked bartending because it gave me time during the day to write my poems, specifically four hours a day. I told him that the poems all followed a certain pattern that was very hard to explain because I had come up with it myself using math and angles. He said that he was sure his job was a paradox, not ironic, and he thought ultimately that poetry should be more spontaneous and expressive than my description of my process suggested.
Or unnexpectedly running into an old fling:
I said oh and and laughed and put my hand over my heart as if he had startled me. He nodded apologetically. He was in Berlin on vacation, his first in three years!
Is there a name for this technique?