Taipei - Tao Lin (2013)

Taipei is Tao Lin's third novel, and his fourth book to be reviewed on Flying Houses.  There is a lot I could potentially write about here, but I think once I hit a certain number of books by one author on this site, I need to rank them:

#1: Taipei
#2: Shoplifting from American Apparel
#3: Eeeee Eee Eeee
#4: Richard Yates

Reading all of these past reviews, I am embarrassed.  This is actually a pretty significant milestone because the last one I reviewed was Richard Yates, and I wrote that almost exactly when I started law school.  Now I am done (and have been done for almost 11 months now) and I often say that law school did very little for me except gave me two more letters to put after my name and improved my writing.  So this will be the test.

I have corresponded with Tao a number of times over the past six years, but for some reason, I don't feel like going through the motions and asking him if he would agree to answer a few interview questions.  This is mainly because Taipei doesn't perplex me in the same manner of some his earlier material.  Taipei is, as I'm sure has already been noted, Tao Lin at his most "accessible."  To be sure, it is still "weird" in that it doesn't really concern itself with the trope of a "plot," but it is consistently his most entertaining work to date, and arguably the one most likely to inspire a film adaptation.  However, I don't think that movie would make a ton of money.  So too with this book.  While it is Lin's "major publishing house debut" (I wanted to write "major label debut" but it seemed like something I would do 4 years ago) and while I hope it earns him a greater following and more sales, it's not exactly going to be his big splash that puts him on Oprah's Book Club (I am assuming that still exists).  But it is a step towards that level of fame.

***

These asterisks signify that I have broken up this review into multiple sittings.  Crucially, this is my 3rd time sitting down to write on it over the past couple of weeks.  My 2nd time, I wrote a lot--perhaps 1,000 words--and for some reason it was not saved, even in this post-security world.  I will whine a fair amount about everything I lost, but I will construct a new rule out of this disaster: from now on, every review that I write in multiple spurts will be marked by asterisks.  It is unfair to pretend that I am as disciplined as it may appear from each post.

But I know I made a few points I want to repeat as I try to unearth the past.  I recounted the plot of Taipei:  Paul is a 26-year-old novelist in November 2009, who goes to parties in Brooklyn and then goes to visit his parents in Taipei, Taiwan.  He then returns to the U.S. and decides that the period between April and September 2010 will be an "interim" period which he has to get through until the book tour for his second novel begins.  He breaks up with his girlfriend, Michelle, during the beginning of the novel; then, he goes out with a girl named Laura for a little while; finally, he reconnects with a girl named Erin, and the story of their relationship is probably the whole point of the book being written.

It should also be fairly obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in Tao that this book is very autobiographical, and I would say his most "personal" book yet.  I say this even though he told me that Shoplifting from American Apparel was "100% autobiographical."  I say Taipei is more personal because, while it still trades in some of the minimalist language of Tao's earlier books, it represents a leap forward stylistically along with a willingness to examine psychological interiority.  Some of the sentences are so long you could mistake this for any number of more "mainstream" authors.

As a corollary to this last point, if Tao's books are drawn from his life, then his friends are the supporting characters.  And there are a ton of supporting characters.  Here let me try to list them, excluding the three girlfriends already mentioned: Jeremy, Kyle, Gabby, Traci,  Anton, Juan, Mitch, Lucie, Amy, Daniel, Matt, Lindsay, Fran, Walter, Taryn, Caroline, Shawn Olive, Harry, Charles, Jeannie, Calvin, Maggie, Cristine, Sally, Mia, Beau, Gary, Alethia, Rodrigo, and Peanut.  From this list perhaps you can tell that this book is primarily a collection of social encounters, which act as a framing device for the three relationships.  None of the relationships is probed very deeply either, except for the one with Erin.

Thus, many of Tao's friends appear here, though I do not.  To be fair, Tao and I have only met twice.  The first time I met him is briefly referenced:

"Paul's book tour's fourth reading--after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district--was in Ohio, on September 11.  Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who'd been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other 'internet friends' to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin's parents' 'mansion,' as Paul called it." (94)

That reading, I am reasonably sure, took place around September 9 at Book Court on Court St. in Brooklyn.  I had moved there a few weeks earlier, and one of the first pieces of mail I received was a copy of Richard Yates, which I reviewed.  I also received Think Tank for Human Beings in General  by Jordan Castro.  Many people have said that Erin is clearly Megan Boyle, but I have not seen anyone postulate that Calvin is Jordan Castro.  But those are the only two "beat" connections I can make.

Tao would not write about me because I said basically nothing to him at that reading.  He seemed to offer a glimmer of recognition when I mentioned that I ran this blog.  He was friendly, but seemed a bit distant, perhaps because he may have been on drugs.

Tao notably took magic mushrooms before a reading in San Francisco and asked readers of his blog to guess which drug he was on after posting a video of the proceedings.  This is also detailed in Taipei:

"Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eights days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel's ex-girlfriend and ex-girlfriend's sister shared.  An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets.  Daniel's ex-girlfriend'sister's boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet.  His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss 'some problems.'  He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email.  He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium.  On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul 'fingered' her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept." (110)

There are a lot of drugs in this book (primarily a lot of Adderall and Klonopin) and I noticed Tao writing more about drugs on his blog during this period.

Thus, October 1, 2011, perhaps 4 months after the date where Taipei ends, in the vestibule of the Whole Foods at Union Square, with Slutwalk and a rainstorm going on outside, I met Tao for the first time since the reading, more than a year earlier.  I asked him if he remembered me, and he said yes.  I asked him if he had really done heroin.  He said yes.  I asked him what it was like.  He said it was like a really strong painkiller.  An older woman walked by and said, "Excuse me!" I replied, "Do you know who this is?  This is the greatest writer of our generation!"  Tao said, "Don't say that."

So I am hoping that Tao will write another book (though I read an interview where he said he just wanted to write shorter books from now on) and that he will include this anecdote.  If he doesn't, then I will.

But back to this book and away from my egomania: at one point Tao mentions going to see the movie Somewhere with Erin.  For some reason, I feel this book is a lot like that movie.  It conveys a mood, a feeling, but doesn't really have much of a story.  The relationship with Erin is the main point of the book, but she doesn't appear until page 90 (out of 248).  There is a great short reference to what must be Center on Halsted, too:

"Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become 'obsessed,' to some degree, with her, anyways, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago's Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends' photos to find any she might've untagged."  (109)

There are moments of this book that seem plucked from a work of "award-winning literature," like Paul and Erin's pseudo-breakdown in Taipei, and pages 35 through 43, which recount Paul's childhood in a way that is both charming and heartbreaking.  Also, the friendship between Paul and Daniel, who seems almost like a precursor to Erin, is very nicely sketched.  Overall, this is not a perfect book, but it is definitely Tao's best.  There are six chapters, and it reads pretty quickly.  It's a good place for newcomers, but fans that have been reading from the beginning will recognize it as his strongest work, too.

Taipei may not be "about" much, but it is a pleasant story about relatively carefree days and the daily life of a quasi-famous artist.  I don't know if Tao's prose represents "the future of literature" anymore, but I still think he is at the forefront of 30 or 31-year-old authors and still writes more intellectually honest material than younger writers looking to cash in on a cinematic trilogy adaptation.  I'm sorry I didn't receive this book in the mail and review it about a year earlier, but I enjoyed reading it, and I'll look forward to whatever Tao does next.  The only question I have is why his website has been stripped back to almost nothing.

We All Sleep in the Same Room - Paul Rome (2013)

That said we never had a creative writing class together, and had we, I would have included him on the short list of best student writers I had read while in attendance at that institution, alongside, oh, Paul Rome, Adam White (technically from Dartmouth), Xenia Viray, and Jordana Rothman--and it bears mentioning that they all came from the same single class out of the eight or so I took.
-Review of Eeeee Eee Eeee (11/26/08)

I don't want to spend this entire review comparing Paul Rome to Tao Lin, but it's unavoidable.  I never had a writing class with Tao, but I had one with Paul.  It would have been fun if all three of us were in that same class--but that above quote suffers from slight inaccuracy: Adam White was not in that class.  I studied with him in Paris in 2003 and he just happened to write a novel while we were there that contained flashes of greatness.  The class to which I was referring was taught by Chris Spain.  I do not want to air dirty laundry but I cannot resist: Mr. Spain did not like me.  During one class, my peers gave comments on a story I had written while I joked quietly with a friend I brought in as a guest of the class (whom I also would list among the "best student writers" I knew if we had not suffered an "epic" falling out two years later).  Mr. Spain did not appreciate my gesture, as he felt it was enormously disrespectful.  He tore into me in the "notes" he handed out during the next class.  His "notes" were classic and I still have most of them saved somewhere.  They were his prescriptions for good writing, though he was always quick to mention that he was probably wrong about everything anyways.  He was very modest.  And in time, of course he was right: I needed more humility.  My ego was too big.  It was good to have too big of an ego, and maybe I would make it big after all, but more likely I would suffer a serious reality check before that happened.  Of course he was right.

Now I realize that 9 1/2 years ago, I had no clue what I was doing.  I majored in Writing and Politics at Gallatin because I liked it when people told me I wrote a good story.  There was no practicality to the matter.  In hindsight it was a colossal waste of $160,000 ($180K?) and I would be much better off today had I gone in for IT or Science or Economics or Business or almost anything else.  I was very much an epicurean.  I lived for the present and did not think of the future, unless it was a future where I was a rich and famous author that got away with being a big slacker throughout most of his adult life.  

Paul Rome acknowledges Chris Spain at the end of We All Sleep in the Same Room, along with a couple other MFA-preppers, saying, "their teachings resonate."  I would have done the same thing in my first novel, except I never wrote an acknowledgments section because nobody ever thought it was good enough to publish.  And to be fair, it is a bit of a mess, and people have told me I am a terrible writer because I do not believe (super-strongly) in the virtues of revision.   I think Paul and I differ on this count:

"After attending NYU's Gallatin School, Rome began his first novel.  Surviving countless edits and multiple formative relationships, We All Sleep in the Same Room is due for release by Rare Bird Books on October 15, 2013." 

That is from the "about the author" section of the press materials I received.  By my count, that is an 8 year gestation period.  And I guess this is where I start with my review: We All Sleep in the Same Room is engaging, humorous, insightful, and memorable.  And it's all over much too soon.

At 179 pages with fairly large type, it reads more like a novella than a novel.  And I have no problem with that!  I subconsciously listed Paul first in that line at the top of this post because the stories he wrote in class seemed effortless.  He has apparently made something of a name for himself in Bushwick with the readings of recent short stories he has written.  I've enjoyed them all!  In particular I remember a funny story about a "bromance" involving bird watching in Prospect Park.  And while this novel has a lovely arc, and builds and builds to a powerful climax, I must admit that I was let down by the ending.

I will do my best to avoid "spoilers" because it is a rare moment on Flying Houses indeed where we review a book two weeks before its release date.  

The main character is Tom Claughlin, a labor lawyer living in Manhattan, near Union Square.  He is married to Raina, and has a 3-year-old son named Ben.  As the novel opens, Tom is watching Ben being carried around by their new babysitter, Frank.  And here it is perhaps worth noting that I am glad Paul includes a male babysitter in the story.  Babysitting is not an equal opportunity profession, and there is little good reason for its rampant sexism.  

I wasn't sure what kind of novel this was going to be when I started it.  It struck me as almost some sort of mystery or detective thing, along the same lines as Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. But in fact it lands squarely in the "literary fiction" category.  

I don't want to give away the plot (it pretty much comes down to a few bad decisions) but the novel splits time between Tom's work life and his home life.  It is written in the first person, and spare.  It flows beautifully.  It reads like a charm.  It's endearing.  It's a pleasure to behold.

But I am sorry.  I cannot get over the ending.  This book has enormous potential and then the ending comes.  Some people may like the ending a lot.  I don't.  I can't help but compare it to "Breaking Bad," since that is the most topical "ending" as of this date.  I liked that ending because it wasn't a WTF ending.  WTF endings sometimes work best, and I have even tried a couple times to use them.  And maybe I'm just getting older, but I like to feel some closure at the end of a book.  Complete and total closure may be too much because a book is sort of different from a movie or TV show--it plays in your mind and seems to exist in a peculiar environment created by both your imagination and the author's.  As such the characters can seem even more real and ending their story can seem like their death and make you sad.

That Paul is able to accomplish this in his first novel is remarkable.  The novel seems plucked out of real life.  I couldn't help but thinking about my cousin and his wife, who are pushing forty and have a four-year-old and a two-year-old and all share a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  This vision of "small family life" in NYC is delightful--but it has a certain dark side that I won't get into.  

Usually I like to excerpt the especially beautiful passages, but there's not much I can include.  There's really not.  Like I said, the entire novel is a pleasure to read, and there is such a logical progression from sentence to sentence that nothing ever feels awkward or forced.  I can, however, point out one thing I am almost 100% positive is a mistake:

"'And you're happy for me?'
'Yes.'
"I'm taking the bar soon, in January.'
'Wow.  So soon.'" (119)

Tom should be responding, "Really?  I thought you could only take it in February!"  I don't mean to be snarky but I mention this primarily because today I found out that I passed the Illinois Bar Exam.  So this is my own little memento on Flying Houses to remember a special milestone day.  But yes, the bar exam is administered in February and July--and from what I understand the last two days in each (except in California where it is 3 days).  Thus even though this novel takes place in 2005 (Hurricane Katrina is mentioned twice, along with a transit worker's strike) and perhaps it might be theoretically possible for there to be an earlier test date, I highly doubt that.

But to make up for that admittedly minor blunder, there is an excellent account of labor law litigation that I know several of my labor-obsessed classmates would read with interest.  It is a relatively small case, but the way it evokes passion in Tom is one of the highlights of the novel.  I was going to excerpt a passage from the climactic scene, but I will not spoil it.  All I can say is that Paul shies away from the typical portrait of litigation in mass media and goes for something much more realistic.  Perhaps it seems a bit like, "that's it?" but in that case it is true to life.  

In the case of the ending, however, the "that's it?" feeling is much more pernicious (for me, at least).  Because I feel like this novel is close to perfect.  I love the scene in McCarren Park, I love the scene at The Polar Express, I love the scenes at Tom's law firm, and I love the scene at the Christmas Party.  And then, something happens.  We don't exactly know what.  The reader can guess.  But it's not clear that's what really happened.  

Thus, We All Sleep in the Same Room suffers only from its WTF ending.  As I've said, I could be completely wrong about this.  I know the MFA contingent is a fan of WTF endings, but I don't know where Paul fits in with the MFA contingent.  He has not gotten his MFA and the question is, is he going to?  

When I reviewed Eeeee Eee Eeee, I interviewed Tao Lin.  I kind of wanted to interview Paul, too.  But I don't have many questions for him.  I would just ask him if he was going to get his MFA.  I'd imagine not.  Most people seem to do that to get their first book published.  Paul did it on his own.  And he did a good job of it.  Why get the MFA?  Because you can always improve your writing?  Maybe, but I know that 9 1/2 years ago Paul was a natural and nothing has changed.  I would not be surprised if Paul follows this up with a collection of short stories, since I would expect him to have a pretty good portfolio by now.  

But the big, big, big question: who is better--Paul or Tao?  Tao is an acquired taste.  Truthfully, Tao is more of an original, just because of the bonkers marketing machine that is his internet presence.  Paul is more of a "one size fits all" writer.  I don't want to say one writer is better than the other, but I will say that We All Sleep in the Same Room is better than Eeeee Eee Eeeee and Richard Yates and about as good as Shoplifting from American Apparel.  I have not read Taipei, though to be fair Tao did try to send it to me, but it is published by Vintage (i.e. "big-time") and Vintage does not care about Flying Houses (though Random House may...).  I have read that Taipei is Tao's best book yet, and that perhaps should be compared to this.  But it will need to wait.

Regardless of who is better, let Paul Rome become as famous as Tao Lin.  Let all of the NYU alumni of the Class of 2005 go on to fantastic, wonderful lives and careers where they create beautiful art.  I will look forward to reading all of Paul's work and I hope he goes on to construct a powerful oeuvre.  It is at least fun for me to pretend I was friends with people before they got famous. 

Richard Yates - Tao Lin

This will be one of the last posts on Flying Houses for a long time. A friend of mine recently told me that I should spend more time studying and less time blogging since studying involves the financial investment. But I requested this book and I am not going to be negligent when it comes to following through on promises.

Yes, perhaps a bit of personal narrative is in order before this official review begins, since it is such a serious occasion. I requested a copy of Richard Yates from Tao Lin's publicist on July 6, 2010, approximately 5 weeks before I would move to Brooklyn for law school. I knew I would receive the book in my new apartment in Brooklyn, and I knew there would be law school assignments, and I knew it would appear negligent if I blogged about underground literature instead of reading and briefing cases. But I did it anyway because I knew it was the last chance I would have to do an advance review of a relatively highly-anticipated new title.

I will not be interviewing Tao as I did for previous reviews of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. Not that I don't want to, but again, time, and negligence. I received Richard Yates in my apartment foyer on Monday, August 16. There were two packages from Melville House* and I was just out of my 2nd day of "preliminary" law school classes. I was very depressed. I was thinking that there was no way I could possibly survive the next three years. It would not be sustainable. In this depressed mood, I immediately began reading Richard Yates, which is usually the best time to read books by Tao Lin. I read for an hour and made it through roughly 1/4 of the book and then decided it was time to go get drunk and watch a movie on Netflix. It was Comedians of Comedy and I laughed very much. Sometimes I would go outside and smoke a cigarette. I would put my iPod boombox by my window and play music and go outside and sit outside my window on a stoop and listen to the music and smoke. It came time to go to bed and I began having a nervous breakdown. Sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning I fell asleep. Then I woke up around 6:30 am or so and resumed having a nervous breakdown, and I opened up my word processor and did a free-write about the inevitability of my decision to suicide. This put me in a weird manic mood, and I went to shower and then went to another set of preliminary classes around 8:15 am.

Several hours later, the nervous breakdown had been quelled, and I enjoyed a calm lunch in the school cafeteria while reading Richard Yates. Then later I smoked a cigarette in the school's gated entrance and read more of Richard Yates. I was enjoying it very much.

I did not read any more of it on Tuesday night. I watched two movies on Netflix after being at a bar for a school outing--The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The Cruise (the latter of which I had seen before and should be required viewing for anyone living in New York City), also while drinking more beer and continuing to smoke cigarettes in this manner.

This morning, Wednesday, I resolved not to smoke any cigarettes or drink anything alcoholic. I went to the bookstore and waited forty-five minutes to get my books and was very frustrated but then happy it was over. I went to a pizza place for lunch and read more of Richard Yates, but only a few pages. Then I went into the school library and read a few more pages of Richard Yates. Then I went to class, and then I came home, and I resolved to finish reading the rest of Richard Yates. I also received a chapbook from Jordan Castro today and think I will try to review it as the last true blog post for a long time.

And I finished reading Richard Yates around 7:05 PM and it is now 7:35 PM. So, I suppose we can begin then?

Richard Yates is a very narrow book. It is about one thing, and one thing only: a relationship between a 16-year-old named Dakota Fanning and a 22-year-old named Haley Joel Osment. It is perhaps worth noting that Tao Lin does not attempt to seriously recreate the lives of these celebrities. Haley Joel Osment (hereafter referred to as HJO) is a graduate of New York University who spends a lot of time in Bobst Library and lives on Wall St. Dakota Fanning (hereafter referred to as DF) is a high-school student living in Secaucus, New Jersey. They meet on the internet and quickly begin dating and take buses and trains to visit one another.

It is about that one thing only, but within that, it is about many other things: self-mutilation, bulimia, health food stores, sex, lying, G-chat, movies, emo bands, and writers like Lorrie Moore and Richard Yates--in short, par for the course for a Tao Lin novel. I don't begrudge Tao for writing about the same topics. I have written enough to know that certain themes become obsessive to certain writers, and there is no shame in repetition, so long as it offers something new.

And I have been looking forward to this book for a couple years now and I predicted that it would be Tao Lin's most mainstream effort yet, and in certain regards I am right and in certain regards I am wrong. Tao does branch out into a more detailed "consistent" "straightforward" narrative than he has in the past. It is much more focused on the characters and there are no tangents that make little sense, as in Eeeee Eee Eeee. And I think technically, the rough draft of this novel was finished before Shoplifting from American Apparel was written, and then this novel was edited heavily after that novella was finished.

And perhaps that holds the key to my feelings. In a sense, I appreciate what Tao is trying to do with this book. But in another sense, I could not get into it as much as his previous two long-form prose works. Perhaps it is because I was rushing through it because I was in law school.

Here is my problem with it, essentially: it does not need to be a novel. I do not want to say that but it is the way I feel. I think it would have made an excellent short story, or a very good novella, but as the longest book he has done yet (not sure on this, but it seems longer than Eeeee Eee Eeee) it tends to drag. HJO and DF are two of the most interesting characters he has portrayed yet, but their story is too narrowly-focused.

So I went through periods where I thought the book was great, and periods where I thought it was not so great. My opinion depended on my mood, and the book could not distract me from present circumstances. Some people have been giving it bad reviews and not even reading to the end. I read to the end but I think the strongest parts are in the first 120 pages. It is in the last 80 pages that most of the "climactic" scenes occur, but I found HJO and DF's conversations becoming too repetitive, and almost too pointless. I do like how HJO wants to help DF near the end despite his weakening feelings for her. And I like the scene where they make funnel cakes at the carnival, and I like the scene where they go to Epcot, and I like the scene where they dye DF's hair black and she "turns goth." I also enjoy the references to self-mutilation and bulimia and Ernest Hemingway biographies and Nicholas Sparks for personal reasons.

There are many little moments in this book that are nice, but on the whole, I did not find it as interesting as Lin's two previous novels. Something has been made about this book being autobiographical and if that is the case then I understand why Tao felt that it needed to be published. I do not think everything in this book really happened. Or maybe everything in this book did happen, but certain details about people are skewed. I can't tell, and it doesn't really matter either way. It is fiction. And while I would love to give Tao positive reviews from here until the end of days, I can only half-heartedly recommend this novel.

It is worth reading for its "experimental" aspect for Tao Lin personally. It is more straightforward, in a sense, but it is also just like his previous work in that description is totally eschewed in favor of maximum repetitive action with repetitious objects. The element I like most is its "realist bent."

This is a minutely-detailed (though not deeply descriptive) account of a relationship that rings true. You feel that you are reading about a "real relationship" that might prove educational in some way. But it is only educational if you are a 22-year-old going out with a 16-year-old and all of the weird things that come with it. Neither HJO or DF is very mature, but obviously HJO has a slightly more complete view of life. The tagline for this book is, "What constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?" I am not sure I like it, and it does not seem like Tao wrote that tagline, but I may be wrong. Regardless of whether or not I like it, the implication is that this book is an exploration of that sort of "illicit sex" and one gets the impression that it will be "titillating." But it is not titillating at all, even with more than a few scenes of sexuality. There is lots of G-chat. I think maybe more than 50% of this book's content is in the form of G-chat. The rest is extremely dialogue-heavy, and most of the dialogue seems almost meaningless.

I haven't read any books by Richard Yates, but I did see the movie Revolutionary Road and that was a narrowly-focused narrative on one relationship. Perhaps his other books are like that, and this is Tao's homage to him. If so, that is fine, that is nice. Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring to make fun of Sherwood Anderson.

So maybe there is a deeper layer to this book that I can't quite see, but taken on its own terms, I feel that is lacking in something, or that there is too much of nothing in it. I do believe it would make a great short story, and if it were edited down to just a few essential scenes instead of an exhaustive diary of every conversation (most glaringly, the four-page paragraph where DF tells HJO every single time she has lied to him in a long e-mail, which is either the best or worst part of the book, depending on your view), I would have liked it much more. Such as it is, I am glad I read it, I am glad I reviewed it during this tumultuous time in my life, and I look forward to reading whatever else Tao Lin's next project will be. Shoplifting from American Apparel was "roughly" written after this, and it is my favorite thing by him so far, so whatever he has been working on for the last year, or whatever he will be working on for the next year, I think, will continue to improve. This does seem a bit like an object from a time-capsule despite its latter-day editing. I remember reading a blog post by Tao Lin a long time ago saying he was going to write a novel about Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment and thinking that it was a joke. Imagine my surprise when I read the plot descriptions for Richard Yates.

This novel isn't a joke though. It's a serious attempt at something different, and I respect that. One can learn something from it. Sometimes exhaustive recitation of events and conversations do not automatically make for compelling literature. I have been guilty of this (and am still guilty of this, at times) so I understand the motive behind it. But without any deeper significance, or any hints of deeper significance, the reader finds themselves lost, and wonders why this information was so important to communicate.

*I received two copies of Richard Yates because I requested one from the publicist and then entered Tao's contest, which gave a copy of the novel as an award to all legitimate participants. I have an extra copy so if anyone wants it, I will send it to them, but I would prefer for them to live in Brooklyn Heights so I don't have to mail it.

My Essay on Tao Lin and Our Histories Intertwining

ORIGINS

I have been aware of Tao Lin for approximately four years. The first instance of our relationship began when I left a comment on his blog about an interview he had done for Bookslut. This comment is still on his blog and I look back on it and feel embarrassed since it is one of only 2 comments on a link still prominently displayed.

That post attempted to engage Mr. Lin for our similar educational backgrounds, similar age, and similar vocational practices. I do not think we have much in common otherwise. However, one of my best friends once shared a dorm room with him.


GENEROSITY

One of my favorite things about Tao is his generosity. After my first abortive attempt at contacting the iconoclast, I applied to MFA programs, became a reject, finished my first novel, moved to L.A., wrote 70% of a second novel, and returned to my home. Boomeranged, broken. I didn’t know what I was going to do anymore. I finished that second novel, and then I started doing NaNoWriMo. Halfway through November, I got a temp job, which was nice. Then, right as I was about to finish NaNoWriMo, call it a case of “chemically-unbalanced-writer’s-excitement/manic part of manic depression,” I decided to ask Tao if I could review his first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee for my blog, which I had started in L.A. He said yes and sent me the book for free and I read it and asked him if I could interview him and he said yes. I finally wrote that review on Thanksgiving morning, 2008.

Later I would lend it to my friend who is a tough critic. Tao passed that test.
Later I would ask if I could do the same for Shoplifting from American Apparel. This was in August of 2009. Tao agreed again. More generosity.
A few days ago I asked if I could receive a galley copy of Richard Yates. My request was honored. Generosity again. I hope to have that review up in August 2010. And I hope to do a few more interview questions.

I am not a book critic for the Chicago Tribune or New York Times, and while I am sure Tao would love their coverage, I appreciate his ability to make this complicated job called “fiction writer in 21st century” a little more transparent for all of us. I don’t know if I want to be a writer anymore when I read his blog posts about how little money he earns from writing. I keep doing it regardless, and I don’t think clearly about prospects for my future. Perhaps I am missing the point: my blog. Flying Houses is not even HTML Giant or MOBYLIVES, but Tao gave me a chance, and I am happy with having a few more readers that could potentially find something else they like on it.

NETWORKING

All my Dad ever talks about is networking. I hate networking. I hate going to cocktail parties, because I get too wasted, and whatever connections I might make, well, people just think I am a drunk, and therefore unstable, and therefore not worth their networking time. That’s in person. Networking on the internet is different. For one, it is scarier. If anyone wants, they can go cycle through all my old posts on this blog, or on the messageboard at pw.org. and find something I said that is terribly stupid and deserving of hardcore condemnation. It happens. Cyberbullies exist. But on the other hand, networking on the internet is so easy. Add a friend on Facebook. Talk to someone about what they tweeted about. It’s all well and good and nice and fun. But what about when you want to “get serious” and meet in person? What do you have to say that is of any import? How do you not come off sounding like a total vulture?

No more ruminations on the internet, though the internet plays a huge role, I would argue, in Tao’s literature. I have not read Richard Yates but I want to because I liked both his first novel and his first novella. I have not read Bed and it would be nice to have a copy.

SHORT STORY

Here is a short story about what happened to my copies of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel: I met a girl through an online dating site and we went out a few times and she seemed like one of the coolest girls I had ever met in my life. We would go out to lunch or dinner, and we would get stoned and listen to indie rock, and we would watch movies, or else walk nearby Barack Obama’s house in Kenwood. In short that is what I like to do with my time. She was cute and I was willing to look past the fact that she was a Starbuck’s barista and generally unreliable when it came to comprehensive assessments of life. As is the case with most of the girls I have dated, she broke up with me in a very passive-aggressive manner. This was not before I had leant her some CDs, and these two books by Tao Lin. She did invite me back once, so she could give me the CDs. But she had not finished both books. She loved them. She wrote on her Facebook wall that they “made her feel schizophrenic” and that she “couldn’t stop reading.” She also wrote that Tao was apparently a “friend of a friend.” Not anymore, because a couple weeks later, she de-friended me. This after I sent her random text messages asking her if she planned to give the books back. She said, in her text message, “I never intended to keep the books.” Well, she still has them. The copy of Eeeee Eee Eeee had a personal inscription from Tao to me that I cherished deeply. And now it sits in whatever sordid living room she inhabits, corrupt, wrong, inappropriate for her to own.

HIPSTERS

My feelings about this girl are roughly commensurate with my feelings about hipsters in general and Tao’s fans. That is, on the surface, they are fun, they are cool, they are the type of people I want to befriend and hang out with, but underneath, once you get to know them, you realize they are weird and mean and don’t give good reasons for the fucked-up things they do to you. I’m not trying to give them a bad name—I’m just talking from personal experience, and leaving open the opportunity for someone to prove me wrong.

RICHARD YATES, THE NOVEL

Richard Yates, I believe, will be Tao’s best book yet. I don’t want to get too crazy since I haven’t read it yet, and I don’t want to say, “I was wrong!” in my upcoming review. But each of his first two novels showed a progression, and Richard Yates is a more serious title than either of the first two, and Richard Yates was a very good writer (so I’ve been told), and I know Haley Joel Osment and I share at least two things in common and I don’t know why Tao chose to use celebrity names as main character names, but I happened to do the same thing in my third novel (in progress) and I wonder if it has to do with the fact that nobody reads anymore and everybody goes to the movies (or if it is to make casting an adaptation easy).

(By nobody obviously I mean “95% of the American populace does not read, or would not recognize the name Tao Lin” and by everybody I mean “95% of the American populace will not have seen The Runaways but will know who Dakota Fanning is and everybody saw The Sixth Sense, etc.)

MEETING TAO

I have suggested that Tao visit Quimby’s book shop in Chicago so I could see him on tour. I thought that would be so cool. Then I see he has set a date there. Have fun there, Tao! If you moved from Williamsburg to Wicker Park, you’d be like, the coolest person since Stephanie Kuehnart. But now I will be unable to see that glorious moment, as I will be entrenched within new legal studies. Still, I will be in Brooklyn, and I hope I will meet Tao eventually.

He is like a legend, a ghost. But he exists. Who made that “I am Carles” t-shirt? I don’t know, but I saw one person wearing one at the Pitchfork Festival last weekend. Whatever Tao’s army is, it grows. It grows because literature, as we know it, the ability to make our voices heard, to be paid for our time spent actively opening up our worlds for strangers to inhabit and learn from experience, is dead or dying. I suffer, and wait to kill myself until I am 40 because that’s about the time most people realistically publish their first novel these days. But as I suffer, Tao’s army grows, and I attempt to join it, and do not feel like a full-fledged member, but still feel as if I am “part of something.” Tao’s detractors may say that his work is meaningless or immature or just plain stupid (all critiques are understandable, too), but they are just looking for a way to assert their dominance in literary games. They don’t break the same rules as him. They think the rules he breaks are sacred.

DEATH OF LITERATURE

No rules are sacred when literature is dying. I will persist in saying literature is dying until an agent speaks with me personally about why my work is bad. Tao is not going to save literature. And he may not even have found a way for it to pay his own rent yet, but he updates his blog mercilessly, I know he works very hard, and one day it will have to pay off. It will have to pay off or else you have to start challenging anyone who dreams of being a writer: what do you have to say, why is it so important to say, why are you special, and can you figure out the secret combination to unlock a publishing contract?

I don’t like challenging people on their dreams. Society in general is at fault here, but Tao is doing what he can to make things right, and for that I will always read his books.

Shoplifting from American Apparel - Tao Lin (+ Interview)

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/minimalist-detail/

This is my first published piece since college. Aren't you proud of me?

Here is the uncensored version. A note about the list of authors: I do not think Tao Lin is as good as most of these authors, but he is certainly as good as some of them. It is merely an illustration of the place that he has carved out for himself amongst the biggest names of today. If anybody is missing, please feel free to comment.

Around 5:15 PM today I looked at the mail and saw that my advanced reader’s copy of Tao Lin’s new novella Shoplifting from American Apparel had arrived. I was dismayed to see it read “DO NOT QUOTE.” One of the staples of my blog is quoting large portions of text from the work being reviewed. If I was allowed to quote from this book, I would choose something that the drunk guy in the jail cell says. That was the funniest part of the book for me. Anyways it is 8:56 PM and I am finished reading the book and in that time I also watched the Cubs play the Florida Marlins in Florida and the Cubs lost.

Tao Lin’s fifth book, and first novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, will probably not register on your pop culture radar. But if you are at all interested in the future of literature, take notice. It is not going to win any awards, but it is a stop-gap between Lin’s first novel Eeeee Eee Eeee and his forthcoming second novel Richard Yates, a work that hints at Lin moving in a more mainstream direction, with greater exposure, and an increasing legion of fans. This book is about a main character named Sam (who seems almost entirely autobiographical), and various friends Luis, Sheila, Kaitlyn, Paula, Hester, Joseph, Chris, Jeffrey, and Audrey. Sam does shoplift from American Apparel and then later he shoplifts from the NYU Computer Store, a pair of $40 Sony In-Ear headphones, which particularly affected me as my Sony headphones have recently gone mute on the left side and I would replace them but I don’t want to spend $40. But headphones cost $4.99, says a teenage girl in a jail cell that has been caught shoplifting from Urban Outfitters. Sam works at an organic vegan restaurant in the East Village, I think, and he has to do two days of community service in order for the shoplifting arrest to be expunged from his record.

I have only previously read Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin and I would have to say that there are generally less plot holes in this book than in that one, though “plot holes” is an inaccurate term—“minimalist detail” might be closer to the truth. More to the point, Eeeee Eee Eeee features a number of absurdist elements like talking bears and dolphins and celebrity slaughterhouse imagery, whereas Shoplifting is content to stay firmly planted in the real world, even if it is a narrowly defined one. This is my biggest complaint about Lin’s work as a whole, and I’d imagine a potentially serious issue for his critics. Detail is eschewed in the name of wit, or poignancy. Minimalism is evoked and any hope that a comprehensive exploration of any particular subject is going to happen is squelched. If there is anything this book does explore comprehensively, it is the phenomenon of GChat, along with other internet staples of today, like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Photobucket.

Which brings me to my next point. For the sake of neat classification and perspective, let’s look at, who, in my mind, are some of the most prominent (or similarly directed) living authors of today, based on their age-decade:

90’s: J.D. Salinger.
80’s: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ray Bradbury, Gore Vidal, Milan Kundera.
70’s: Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy.
60’s: Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, Richard Ford, John Irving, Joy Williams, Ann Beattie (the latter two influences on Lin).
50’s: Lorrie Moore (ditto), Dennis Cooper, David Sedaris.
40’s: Bret Easton Ellis, Rick Moody, J.K. Rowling, Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Lange, Chuck Palahniuk.
30’s: Stephanie Meyer, Wells Tower.
20’s: Tao Lin, (Probably his MuuMuu House posse, too)

He is on the wrong side of 25 though.

If it is not already clear at this point, Tao Lin may not be for you. It is easy to see why his work as a whole has been extremely divisive. On the one hand, there are struggling writers who work in a much more traditional style who feel their work may be “about something”—whether it be vampires, struggling with mental illness or a traumatic experience, serial dating in an urban environment, the world of fashion, or the experience of being a soldier fighting in a war—and are constantly met with rejection. These comprise half of Lin’s critics—and the other half are the part of the literary establishment that seek to promulgate their MFA credentials by supplementing their income with teaching, who mistake minimalism in their student’s work for laziness.

But then there are those who understand where Lin is coming from, to a certain extent. He has amassed a rather impressive contingent of fans and in his work they see themselves—that is, lonely, depressed, and probably spending too much time on the internet. Any visit to his blog (formerly entitled “Reader of Depressing Books,” now listed as the difficult-just-for-the-sake-of-it http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/), and the many comments on any of his posts, will show that now, approximately 50% of his followers have adopted his voice and pose.
But it would not be fair to call Lin’s aesthetic a “pose”—because it is authentic, if anything. Of course it is sarcastic, and while it may come off as flippant at first blush, upon further review the tone is refreshingly honest, and free of pretense.

And it is also not fair to say that Shoplifting is meaningless. True, it does seem that Lin simply doesn’t care about satisfying a reader’s expectations, but there is a story here: Sam’s relationship with Sheila, which is almost immediately over in a very short number of pages with eight months elapsing almost instantaneously; the psychiatric effects of GChats with Luis in the wake of this heartbreak and larger issues of emotional well-being; the shoplifting crimes themselves, which act as fulcrums to the story at the ¼ and ¾ points, respectively; the Scrabble-induced hook-up with Paula and the ambiguous sleepover with Kaitlyn; the pining for Sheila during the course of a later relationship with Hester, who seems to not let Sam be himself; the long denouement, somewhat reminiscent of the ending of Eeeee…,that details the course of a weekend spent in Gainesville, FL to perform a reading (which describes the actual beginning of the Shoplifting…) at a free vegan buffet at a record store; and finally, the revelation of Sheila’s current state. There is one celebrity appearance, by the musician Moby, but it should not offend any fans of his (as certain depictions of Sean Penn did for me in Eeeee…).

Today, there is no other literary figure of his age that has caused so much controversy and received so much criticism, praise, and gossip. Most of that is his own doing. In now “famous” PR moves, he has sold royalty shares from his novel to be published in 2010, Richard Yates, for $2000 a piece, he has sold his profile on MySpace, and he has started his own literary imprint which features similarly-minded writing from authors in the same approximate age group. This leads me to the analogy that, what Calvin Johnson is to music, Tao Lin is to literature. While the underground music scene in the 1980s spread their message through zine culture, the underground literary scene twenty-five years later is conducted through the blogosphere. And like Johnson, Lin espouses some of the same virtues: veganism, a “twee” sensibility, and the support of other artists with a similar aesthetic. If this comparison holds up, Lin can expect as long and fruitful a career as Johnson’s, so long as he remains true to his original ideals.

I asked Tao a few questions about Shoplifting from American Apparel and his career in general. Here are the questions I asked him and the answers he gave:

JK: Why did you want to write Shoplifting….? Was this based on a real experience? I think I remember reading somewhere that you really did get caught shoplifting once.
TL: Shoplifting from American Apparel is based on real experiences. Some events and dialogue are not entirely accurate or in the same order as it happened in reality. But it was 100% based on the concrete reality of my life.

JK: How much of Shoplifting would you say is autobiographical, percentage-wise? Some of the GChats in the book seem almost to be lifted from real life—are they made up?
TL: I would say 100% of Shoplifting from American Apparel is autobiographical. I think nothing is “made up.” There are maybe 2-10 lines that while typing it onto the computer screen, or editing it into what is in the final book, I felt some kind of awareness that the line did not occur exactly "like that" in the memory of my life. If forced to say what percent of the book is "true" I would say 97%.


JK: Do you think you will ever stop writing? Under what circumstances would you be compelled to spend the majority of your time focusing on a different profession?
TL: I don’t feel I will ever stop writing. If I don't write for, say, five years or something I feel I still would not say I have stopped writing, in that it seems like I'll never consciously stop writing. At this point in my life I think I view writing as I do talking or walking or eating healthy food, to some degree, in that it can be a means in itself, but is more often a means to other things, such as friendship, "feeling connected" with someone, money, or to feel less bad physically or emotionally.
In addition I feel "vague" re "what is 'writing' to me." When I am thinking things, in my head, I sort of view that as “writing,” in that most of the time I think in language, in sentences or sentence fragments with words in them.
Maybe I would spend the majority of my time focused on something else if I lived in an environment without computers or pens or humans, like if I lived on an island, alone, and had dogs for companionship and was satisfied. Maybe that would be a situation where I would think less in language and more in "sounds," or something, and "stop writing."

JK: I am just curious—when did you actually complete the final edits on Shoplifting and submit it for printing? I think “Obama” comprises 2 out of the 30,000 words of the manuscript or so—was this after the election?
TL I finished a “final draft” maybe three or four months after the election. I think the novella ends a few days before the election.

JK: Richard Yates will be released next year and I think a lot of people are looking forward to it. Are you working on something new, or still in the revision process? Can you tell us anything about your new projects?
TL: I think a “final draft” of Richard Yates was finished around October or November of 2008. I foresee working on Richard Yates for probably 100-200 more hours, in a period of maybe 1-2 months, maybe this December or January.
Currently I view myself as being focused on promoting Shoplifting from American Apparel. I feel I will continue this focus until November or December, when I will then edit Richard Yates until February or March. After that I will probably begin to view myself as being focused on a new project.

JK: Your work seems to espouse the “minimalist” style. What kind of effect do you like about not providing lots of detail, for example? Is it important enough to you even if it prevents you from reaching a larger audience? It seems like most readers want something more “all-encompassing,” or something.
TL: I view my writing, up to Richard Yates, as having two different styles, in terms of prose (poetry, too, maybe, but will focus on prose in this answer). I view these two styles as distinct relative to each other.
My first story-collection, Bed, was one prose style. Bed had many long sentences, adverbs, adjectives, words I normally don't say "in real life," semi-colons, and em-dashes. The rhetorical parts of my first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, also employ this style that was first seen in my oeuvre in Bed.
The other prose style I have worked in, I feel, is that of Shoplifting from American Apparel and Richard Yates. These two books have almost no concrete details and very little adjectives, adverbs, semi-colons, or em-dashes. The sentences are short and I use only words I would also feel "normal" saying "in real life."
I feel that both styles can reach a large audience. Ernest Hemingway and Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut do not provide much detail and seem to have a large audience. William Faulkner and Thomas Pynchon seem to have very long sentences that probably provide many details and they also seem to have a large audience.