Despite the setting being so grounded in the Trump era, Oyler’s own experiences during those four years (hell, a whole long-winded section of the book is set at the 2017 Women’s March), and the opportunity both of those elements present, the book has nothing revelatory to say about millennials coming of age during that time. The plot evaporates so quickly that it seems like every situation gets into only operates as a jumping off point into her political commentary that seems like it would’ve been better off in essay form.
Endless paragraphs that are supposed to come off as totally original or “shocking” analyses of the sociopolitical moment read like takes I’ve heard a million times in the post-2016 discourse on Twitter. She affords her every thought an importance it simply does not have to anyone but herself, and the way she marvels at her own brain gets exhausting real fast (at least she admits that she finds herself “fascinating”). What makes Oyler's novel so unpalatable is that it is saturated with self-obsession she obviously considers herself much more perceptive than she actually is (I say “she/herself” because it’s very hard for me to believe, given the similarities between the two, that the narrator could be anything but a reflection of Oyler and that this is more memoir than novel). That plot is discarded after the first 30 pages and instead serves (unconvincingly) as the impetus for her not-so-transformative foray into the Berlin dating scene, and the book then devolves into a running log of her takes on any topic even tangentially related to the events of the Trumpian era.Īs a fan of "plotless" books, I'm not averse to streams of consciousness, meandering philosophical arguments, and paragraphs devoid of periods.
The marketing of this novel promised an ~*extremely online*~-style story centered around the narrator’s discovery that her boyfriend is peddling conspiracy theories on Instagram on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. That so many people edited (though clearly not very thoroughly) and reviewed and actually got through this slog of a 272 page novel and still concluded that it’s heralding in some new era or genre of contemporary millennial fiction is.
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