the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

i don't know if i agree that it's "less cynical" than 'eeeee ee eee' -- i think the way that that book is constructed with an event of emotional heft to retroactively justify some of its tone is actually p cynical?

one thing i do feel is that while lin-the-writer seemed to be covering the life-events of 'sam' in 'shoplifting' and 'haley joel osmont' in 'richard yates' with a level of irony, a narratorial distance, an awareness that these events demonstrated that these characters were pretty shitty people, 'taipei' is more normally autobiographical in that it seems more to want to demonstrate and make you empathize with paul's emotional causes for his actions, if not to make you think paul is a good person. whereas the earlier two often omit the interior stuff that would normally do the work of presenting a character's actions as justified at least in that character's own psyche

when i say 'irony' in the above i don't mean irony as in the kind of glibness and refusal-to-commit that people reduce him to and then dismiss as in a lot of the posts upthread (writing a parody of a writer and then pointing out how bad the parody is is a not-great mode of criticism unless your parody is really, really good) -- i am going to say 'flaubertian' in a vague sort of hand-waving way, since i have not read either these books or flaubert since 2010 or so -- and besides this irony isn't the tonic in 'taipei' the way it is in the earlier stuff. it's been replaced by something deeper but probably unhealthier.

it's probably a decade since i read any bret easton ellis but i have described lin as being 'like a bret easton ellis that was actually good' on a couple occasions -- also (and this is for people who are better at doing the american scene to unpack than i am probably) it seems like bee's being an LA person who spent formative years at a NE liberal arts school vs lin's being a suburban florida kid who went to NYU and stayed there thereafter might be pretty operative in their worldviews

heh also i totally appreciate treeship in this thread but

the infinite subtlety of social interactions in henry james' day, when living as an expat meant something, and people had real faith in the validity of their experiences

haha dude

oh, i think eeee eee eeeee is less cynical than taipei. it's very empathetic in its portrayal of that teenage girl, ellen i think her name was, and in general i think it is a far less radical, more relatable depiction of lonely, alienated people than taipei, which depicts the mental experience of a person in the outer reaches of depression, who at times isn't even sure he wants to be human anymore. maybe "cynical" isn't the word: eeee eee eeeee is superficially glib, but there is a pretty clear humane core, and while that is still true of taipei it seems, at times, that it is withering away. of course, by the end of the book with paul's "revelation" it becomes clear that tao lin/paul, in the end, doesn't want to pursue that direction any further... paul is in the novel's final line "surprised to hear himself say he was happy to be alive."

i didn't think this was a cheap moment, personally, i think it is in keeping with tao lin's whole "project". he is at heart a kind of old fashioned novelist -- his main concern, in each of his books, in my view, has been to depict private suffering in a way that doesn't cheapen it, and he has used different devices throughout his career to do this. maybe is lin allowed himself to push taipei further, and allow paul to settle comfortably into his alienation as he fantasizes about doing in taipei very early on in the book, it would be a more radical achievement, but i wouldn't like it as much. the book, in reality, never does more than skirt the abyss because paul's sense of absurd humor anchors him, most of the time, to a more recognizable, relatable kind of consciousness. he is never really as alone as he feels.

part of the "magic" of novels, or certain kinds of novels, is that it allows people to see how their strangest, darkest, most paranoid moments -- when they feel the most isolated -- are things other people have also experienced, and are in fact part of a kind of shared experience. the fact that lots of people can relate to and appreciate kafka is an inspiring thing, really. george orwell said this about dostoevsky: that finding he could relate to raskolnikov, a fucked up antisocial murderer, actually had the effect of making the world seem smaller and less hostile. like, this recognition that even the worst people are people after all... that even if you find yourself thinking that you are the worst person, you are still a person.... this is what orwell found valuable in dostoevsky, and i think a similar thing is at least part of what i find valuable about tao lin.

why do you find that valuable about TAO LIN and not a billion other young authors?

cf. my review and my other posts on this thread.

sorry i don't mean to be glib, but i really shouldn't write more about tao lin on ilx. i don't think people want me to do that.

i do. don't let occasional mockery and sense that you're taking an unpopular position get you down.

contenderizer otm, if you can get a reaction out of people you're prob doing something right

he's great at self-promotion apparently. as far as writing goes what i've seen of TAO LIN doesn't hold a candle to what dylann's been up to in his hotel job thread imho

xxp yes. i liked your comments treeship, made me think twice about checking out tao lin, which is a first.

i meant to write "less cynical than 'taipei'". oops

Yeah I have enjoyed treezy's contributions to this thread but I also think he was right to respond glibly to that dumb question above

i dunno treezy comparing his appreciation for TAO LIN to orwell's appreciation for dostoyevsky sorta called for clarification

let's return to the part where Henry James is distant

xp reggie

the way it connects to the orwell-dostoevsky thing is that i think paul's experience is about a person who slowly recognizes that, lonely as he is, he is not really alone because even his darkest, strangest, moments of despair are a part of his experience of being human, which is what orwell felt when he read dostoevsky.

the book pushes hipster apathy -- a sense of not being able to take things seriously, but at a historical moment when not taking things seriously has lost its subversive charge -- to metaphysical dimensions: paul flirts imaginatively, throughout the novel, with allowing his identity, his memories, all his connections to the world disintegrate. but at the end of the book he kind of comes back down to earth. he hallucinates that he has died and has been sealed into his own imagination, and will have to rebuild the universe from scratch with himself as the starting point, and he realizes... by overhearing himself say a bunch of things (lol harold bloom) -- that this isn't what he wants. disconnected as he feels from society he is, in fact, essentially of it and not a rootless subjectivity. being "happy to be alive" isn't just being happy to exist... the word "alive" implies more than that, in this context. it has something to do with wanting to embrace being a part of the world, i think, but at the end of the novel it isn't clear how paul is going to do that.

Yeah but why do you like it

I think you owe us an explanation of why you think he's a good writer

xp to myself. this sounds melodramatic but that scene at the end. paul keeps saying "i guess i'm just going to have to deal with it" about being sealed inside his mind forever. i think that's another thing you get from the last section: that paul's absurd humor, his ability to detach himself from what he is experiencing, is a thing that has throughout the novel tied him to a humanistic (vague word i know) mode of experiencing reality, and all his intimations of being fundamentally alienated were bullshit, basically. hipsters can pretend they don't care but it's impossible to *actually* live carelessly in a fundamental sense. i want to say something about heidegger here but it's been a long time since i've read heidegger.

lol wins

wait, that last long comment was botched. i meant to say that the last section, as i described it, seems melodramatic, but is actually pretty funny.

thanks everyone for being patient with me as i worked through my ideas about this book which i liked a lot

treeship i don't think you owe anyone an explanation about anything plus i sense more substance in your posts than in anything i've read by TAO LIN so it was puzzling to me why you'd be so taken with the dude. and you've cleared that up, so thanks

Yeah I mean I know I clown you a lot but your last few posts have been easy to understand, I get why you dig the guy.

kind of wish you would stop using the word hipster tho

everybody should stop using the word hipster

except me cuz i'm mad judicious

i would wear that on a shirt

The word hipster is not without its uses. Or maybe... it is.

wait, jonathan franzen said the n-word??

yeah, when he was being interviewed on deakin's right wing radio show.

Franzan's a sweet thoughtful dude, I don't think he would use bad language. Would like to see what he thinks of Tao, would be interesting. He is well read and stuff.

maybe like with movies we need a ratings system for novels, but based on social class instead of age. not sure if it should be by letter or number or color or some other arbitrary index

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e9ybWTlWFME/T7FMeDoXR7I/AAAAAAAAAE0/zg1C-2ALH2U/s1600/arrested_development_report_card.png

if it's rated bluth people whose parents paid for college/housing would like it?

THAT POST MAKES WATERFACE FEEEL. . . C-

i went to a school that didn't have a grade system

you're lucky. i don't think i believe in grades, except maybe for college or something. even then: for me, they are stressful and anti-motivational.

every semester each of your teachers would write about how you did and all these comments as they were called would all get sent home in a packet

my high school had both grades and comments, and i think it was good to have had the comments.

richard yates is sad sad

It is. It's sort of hilarious too though in its fucked upness, especially the arguments between df's mother and hjo.

The deal with that book, i think, is that the reader slowly realizes that dakota fanning is 16 and all that entails. She is not the sarcastic twentysomething haley joel osment imagines her to be.

What I would say now, two weeks after reading Taipei (it took me two evenings to read it) is that, as gripping as I find tales of young people using drugs, it hasn't left me with much. Maybe it's because whatever insight Tao Lin can offer you is better if you're 12 or 72 years old, but not 25-35.

Last summer about this time I read The Savage Detectives with the same kind of feverish summery heat reading. But that was a book that really left me something. It lasted after I closed the pages. I still think about it here and there and it scares me. Taipei doesn't scare me, it doesn't comfort me, it doesn't really do much of anything once it's done.

"is it, um, a studio apartment?"

this is nice:

After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same songlike beating -- of another, larger, protective heart -- inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.

taipei reminds me, as much as anything else, of kazuo ishiguro's the unconsoled. it's true to the what it describes, but what it describes is a single, unvarying moment, that moment sustained well past the point where traditional narrative would demand development or divergence. a key difference between the two novels is that where the unconsoled energizes its eternal now by hanging constantly on a cliffhanger note of desperate incompletion, taipei mires itself in a listless bog of alienation and routine.

i'm finding the experience of reading this almost aggressively unpleasant, but not because it's a "bad novel". i dislike it because i feel helplessly trapped in it, suffocated, and that's clearly the point. whether or not it's a point worth making at this length remains to be seen.

The Unconsoled is fucking dismal!

i look back on it fondly, but the reading experience was an ordeal

Hmm maybe I could reread it, it's been at least 20 years

or nearly that ;)

tbh, i can't imagine rereading it