The Nature of Things

This is Lauren Oyler's debut novel after a career as a critic studying and explicating the novels of others. It is an innovative work that describes the way that social media has surreptitiously crept into our daily lives and, in some ways, has come to redefine our relationships with others and even the way that we think of ourselves. The relationships described include online stalking and the creation of fake identities, as well as the descent into paranoia and conspiracy theories and a kind of social disengagement and political derangement. That's quite a lot and it isn't even all; the book also includes numerous references - some of which I caught and some I probably missed - to other contemporary writers. The narrative begins at a specific and unsettled point in time, the months between the 2016 presidential election and the inauguration of Donald Trump. Our narrator (who of course is nameless - how could it be otherwise?) is a young woman with a boyfriend who is named....