It’s Not the Internet, It’s You: Fake Accounts

Being meta is pretty much essential to the twenty-first century “novel.” So is exhibiting signs of “immediate retromania.” In the case of Fake Accounts (a non-risqué double entendre of a title), that means taking us “all the way back” to the Women’s March that transpired on Donald Trump’s inauguration day in 2017. As Lauren Oyler’s debut, Fake Accounts firmly establishes her place in the usual insular “New York … Continue reading It’s Not the Internet, It’s You: Fake Accounts

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time Is An Undercutting Attack on Stagnation & Surrendering Your Voice to Others

By now, Zadie Smith has long ago come into her own as an author. Her largely autobiographical voice, which has always served her well (particularly with her debut, White Teeth–and, incidentally, Smith pulls a rather Bret Easton Ellis move in that her narrator references going to school with Irie Jones, who also has a Jamaican mother), reaches a more elevated, literary stride with her fifth … Continue reading Zadie Smith’s Swing Time Is An Undercutting Attack on Stagnation & Surrendering Your Voice to Others