Main Character Energy
Cher Tan on Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)
‘What do you expect? They were only doing their job, making money by making promises. Why are you asking them why they did it? Why not ask why people believed them?’
—Jenny Diski, ‘Stinking Rich’
‘I’m tired of life. I don’t want to do more work. But I still want to be paid.’
—Shoplifting in American Apparel, Tao Lin
‘[…] my life has plagiarised Bernhard!’
—Ben Lerner, in an interview with Tao Lin, The Believer
I first encountered the work of Tao Lin in 2010. When I say ‘encountered’, I mean ‘encountered’ on the shelves of the city library in Singapore, where I lived then. I had just finished an Eggers bibliography binge and was looking for Similar Authors just to give myself something to achieve. What was I to do? I had few friends and worked full-time as a life drawing model.
Having no connections to capital-L literature, I didn’t know what ‘alt-lit’ was then; I was merely reading. And how could I fault Lin? He didn’t overemphasise being Asian, was a weird existentialist slacker and loved drugs. Being vegan (which I was) was considered edgy at the time. A list of substances goes something like Xanax and cocaine and LSD and Adderall and shrooms and Oxycodone and Percocet and ketamine and heroin, some of which are cocktailed at multiple points throughout Taipei. They were a way to stave off the ubiquitous drudgery of living, and a salve for nerves, even if the comedown effects ended up being counter-intuitive. All that wide-eyed curiosity at the world, tempered by a self-doubtful alienation and a ‘me against the world’ solipsism. Lin embodied a certain kind of cool, like he cared but also didn’t give a shit. I was drawn to that kind of earnest ennui because I aspired to it in my living life. The fact that his writing operated within the bounds of a rigid yet sincere syntax and that his characters did what was considered morally bad or frowned upon gave Lin’s work even more of an alluring sheen. He could make something totally normal seem weird, or something totally weird seem normal. It was ‘interesting’ insofar as Sianne Ngai defines it in Our Aesthetic Categories: ‘a tension between wonder and reason.’
This is one of late capitalism’s biggest tricks, or as David Foster Wallace—who Lin is considered adjacent to, and who is among his many references in Taipei—once described as the ‘interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive it is for the reader, so the reader is willing to do it.’ I was willing to do it. At the time I was privately addicted to diet pills and amphetamines, coping mechanisms for mental illnesses I was yet to uncover or acknowledge. After I finished Taipei (which spends the last five pages agonising about possibly overdosing, ending with Lin’s protagonist feeling ‘“grateful to be alive”’), other things happened in my life, and I sort of forgot about him. Six years later, I was working a job one afternoon and saw a copy of his memoir Trip. Immediately my internal monologue was l o l my client has similar taste in books as I do, how dare!!!! I flipped through it and saw multiple mentions of Terence McKenna—one of the original bros of the psychedelic movement, whose ideas I was briefly into. I cringed at the memory of my past self. I posted a self-deprecating Instagram story of the book, packed up and went home.
I didn’t really think about Tao Lin again. I never reread his books, or engaged with news about him. Until the editor of this publication half-jokingly suggested that I write a review of his work, and here I am.
In Taipei, Paul is a socially-anxious writer who doesn’t really do anything. Time is, as Lin wrote in his first novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, ‘like, a thing’: inconsequential, the first half of the book during an ‘interim period’ before a book tour, the second half during and after the book tour. He uses a MacBook and an iPhone, writes in a Moleskine, has conversations on Gmail chat, sends emails back and forth, listens to Rilo Kiley, tweets a bit, goes to or does a bunch of book readings, grins a lot and ‘works on things’ (sometimes without scare quotes). And of course he goes to Taipei: once by himself early in the book to visit his parents who live there, and the second time on a honeymoon with Erin, a woman he had been internet friends with for a while and who he meets up with on his book tour; they eventually get married on a whim in Las Vegas. I now know that Erin is based largely on his (now-ex) wife, fellow alt-lit sensation Megan Boyle; most of their interactions occur under the influence of drugs, which they record as movies on their MacBooks (she also documents her life in her book Liveblog, albeit more explicitly). What happens between those trips? Paul goes to a bunch of parties, hangs out with his friends and is attracted to a bunch of women, a couple of whom he ends up hooking up with. Taipei picks up from Shoplifting in American Apparel, that first novella which set me off. Both arcs are similar, one an extended box set to the other’s EP: in the latter, his protagonist is named Sam and pisses around a lot. In Shoplifting, Sam (also a writer) steals a shirt from American Apparel and a pair of earphones from Urban Outfitters and gets thrown into a lock-up both times. In Taipei, Paul attempts to steal a Smashing Pumpkins CD in Baton Rouge, but escapes arrest when he tells the security guard that he is an author and merely passing by. He successfully steals a Nirvana CD a few hours later. In his real life, Tao Lin was banned from the NYU bookstore after shoplifting in 2008, among other exploits.
But Taipei is written in a way where it doesn’t matter what actually ‘happens’, rather that 1) ambiguity reigns supreme, and 2) every rule in Writing can and will be broken, whether that’s ‘tell’ instead of ‘show’; a litany of adverbs (‘nearly continuously’, ‘talked tensely’, ‘paranormally ventilated’); overwrought similes (such as ‘like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS’, on trying to understand a personal situation); vague yet literal indications of quantities (‘a week later’, ‘in a building containing four to six businesses’, ‘shared 50oz kale-celery-apple-lemon juice and 30mg Adderall’); and liberal use of quotation marks to signal uncertainty or irony. It’s a style Lin has described as ‘concrete-literal’ and which permeates much of alt-lit. When Taipei was published in 2013, reproducing conversations as verbatim chat logs was considered gauche. And then there were the long run-on sentences, you know the ones, infectious and already oft-parodied, how they go on and on and on—like watching a train that never seems to end—that read like breathless spluttering from an incel, which is what I think of when Lin comes to mind now, after you’ve kicked his head in. When I was enamoured by his work, I saw these as weapons in the toolkit of the alienated intelligentsia, whose alienation signalled that we were thus superior from the rest of the human race. This recalcitrance was what I found arresting, and what Ngai in Theory of the Gimmick describes as ‘overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labour saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).’
For the purposes of this review, I asked a question on Twitter, and one novelist, Peter Polites, answered: ‘Bret Easton Ellis […] because he started believing his own press releases.’ For all of Lin’s namechecking of Ellis (who cover-blurbed Taipei), we can imagine they are cut from the same cloth, built off one’s proclivity towards the other’s perceived je ne sais quoi. These were the Gen X proto-types, self-styled after those from the so-called ‘Beat Generation’, paving the way post-2000s—in the western world, mind you, although it must be noted that its shit is leaking outwards—for some of the subsequent generation to emulate their mores. ‘Internet novel’, check. Self-curation, check. Turning objets d’art into shares which then translate into cold hard cash, check. Tunnel vision interiority, check. Dissociation, check. Alienation, check. Affectless prose style, check. Self-awareness, check. Mentally ill and proud of it, check. Indifference about or glamourising rampant drug use, check. Presentism, check.
Granted, Lin was ahead of his time, but there is no future here. Taipei is about a man living in the now, his nowness so exacting that his past never appears to influence his present, except for a brief recollection of an unhappy and lonely childhood near the middle of the book. As another pioneer of psychedelia once whispered, ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. Much of what is referenced or indulged in in Taipei has now left the arena of obscurity and into cliché, popularised and remixed via the combination of the attention economy and the allure of niche—what Safy Hallan-Farah has identified as ‘hyper-real individualism’. Ironically, the now-viral article does not cite Simulacra and Simulation, but it is Baudrillard’s hyperreality we are living in, where copies exist without originals. Ultimately these remixes become part of a ouroboric feedback loop forever circling in on itself, their all-encompassing nowness eclipsing everything that came before.
When Taipei was published, some critics hailed his persona more than the novel itself: Lin was simultaneously a ‘poster boy for alt-lit’ (Guardian), a ‘literary provocateur’ (The Independent) and ‘one of the kings of the empire of online bootstrappers’ (New York Times). One review (Hobart) is written in a deliberately disjointed style—not the first—which I can only assume is to mimic Lin. There is a made-up interview (AAWW) ‘with’ Lin, published after he declines. Without the naïve pretension that infused much of my twenties, I now found it difficult to finish the book. Like many people who answered my question on Twitter, it could be that I simply grew up, or that my position as a critic now has me completely rear-ended by the demons of Literary Taste. Regardless, it is undeniable that Taipei would not be the sensation that it was without Lin’s self-mythology and vice versa.
It begs the perennial question: at what point is life mined for content, and at what point is content derived from life? In an ‘extremely online’ era where nearly any mundane event holds a glimmer of posterity, and which gives the blue check Twitterati license to wax lyrical about any old thing for the consumption of their adoring fans and sycophants, it’s a chicken or the egg hypothesis. An artist’s persona can eclipse the quality of their work—at the end of the day, many people hate boredom and love to be entertained. But here’s the thing: the internet was the real autofiction all along. Lin was just an early adopter.
In what is now no longer news, Lin was reported in 2014 to have sexually and emotionally abused E.R. Kennedy, whom he had been in a relationship with when Kennedy was 16 and he was 22, and what Richard Yates (initially titled Statutory Rape) was based on. There are also allegations of him plagiarising Kennedy’s work. He had helped publish Kennedy under his publishing company, Muumuu House, and they had co-written an online book. In Taipei, 26-year old Paul hangs out with ‘Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school’, and treats women (his mother included) as a necessary yet confounding annoyance; they are either potential lovers he tries his utmost to fathom (such as by ‘reading all four years of her Facebook wall and [...] looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends' photos to find any she might've untagged’) or other men’s girlfriends. We also know about Dov Charney, ex-CEO of the now-defunct brand American Apparel, and Andrew Creighton, ex-president of the VICE media conglomerate. What’s that meme again? ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’
It’s a string of names (Wallace, Diaz, and so on) I don’t wish to regurgitate. They belong on a list we hear about loudly and on whisper networks, each one biding its time until there is room for a reckoning. Then maybe because power is slow in shifting, or people forget, another figure comes in from the fog, happy to take his predecessor’s place. Do we ever learn? Maybe the problem is that we don’t want to.
But this review isn’t about the megalomaniacal men who constitute so much of scenes (literary, artistic, or otherwise), or if art should be a moral project; these have been discussed enough elsewhere. Unlike those novelists (Sebald, Bernhard, Roth, Lerner) whose work Lin obliquely derives from, it’s not a question of ‘authenticity’ versus ‘make-believe’ but rather what is undertaken to wilfully and painstakingly steer ‘the culture’ in a certain direction. Lin’s novels were written and published pre-personal brands and social media influencers; he was just leaning into tried-and-tested foibles (parasociality and projection) and gaming it.
Taipei relies on a mode increasingly observed in novels—particularly those from the influential coastal cities of the US—as we enter a new decade. Social media is no longer a newfangled curiosity, let alone texts or emails. ‘[…] the sensation of his body in medias res’, per Paul’s observation about himself in Taipei, is the affect du jour. Few things are taken seriously, and events are often viewed through the scrim of uncertainty. As Paul thinks to himself at the start of the book, there is ‘“absolutely nothing” to say, except maybe what he was currently thinking, which didn’t seem appropriate and also kept changing.’
This is the kind of ambiguity that Taipei weaponises; it’s impossible to ascertain Lin’s objectives without also fortifying his self-mythology—an attempt at trolling, perhaps. It is what Lauren Oyler (who embarks on creating the same effect as Taipei in her own novel Fake Accounts, albeit against the backdrop of a different decade) notes as an impasse: ‘If the reader thinks this novel is bad, she can’t actually say so: that’s part of the point. Meanwhile anyone who praises it also looks pretty stupid, because it really isn’t good.’ Of course, some novels unwittingly take on a life of their own in fandoms independent of the author, but the fact that Lin continues to encourage these readings in the media points to a shrewd manipulation of the market forces at hand.
Lin has previously stated his belief in the technological singularity, and in an era when AI can be taught to write in his calculated monotone, a self-fulfilling prophecy comes as no surprise. If Paul thinks he might be ‘beta-testing the event by acting like an exaggerated version of himself’, deals with an interpersonal situation he can’t confront by going ‘“afk” […] away from the keyboard of the screen of his face’, and wakes up not knowing ‘anything until three to twenty seconds of passive remembering, as if unzipping a file—newroom.zip—into a PDF’, then it is almost certain that technology has caught up to him, or as it is described in Taipei: ‘[...] mostly indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness’. We get the feeling that expression is being reverse-engineered within a semi-metaphysical account of one person’s existence, and that the self is being denuded into a springboard for a grand-scale social experiment in a world concerned with capital. Checkmate. Good job.
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Cher Tan is an essayist and critic. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, The Saturday Paper, Runway Journal, Overland and The Lifted Brow, amongst others. She is the reviews editor at Meanjin and an editor at Liminal.