It’s a lonely feeling to find oneself unmoved by a book that’s been borne aloft in the sweaty grasp of universal acclaim. If it’s bad enough, one’s initial shrug (“there’s no accounting for taste”) yields to outrage, even paranoia: No way do people mean everything they’ve been tweeting or, worse, claiming at generous length in the pages of respectable magazines. The reader who endures this experience regularly will, for his or her sanity’s sake, try to identify critics who break with the palm frond-waving sycophants. Lauren Oyler, writing in the Baffler or the London Review of Books, is one such critic. Where others fawn over the emperor’s new clothes, Oyler takes creepshots and posts them so that the rest of us might point and laugh, reassured of our sound judgment.

“I’d like to see you try writing a book” is the moron’s challenge to an exacting critic. Sometimes, the critic answers the call. Now Oyler is being borne aloft for her debut novel, Fake Accounts, and the fanfare carries a whiff of apotropaic magic, like calling the Furies “the Kindly Ones” to appease them or escape their notice.