Time is like, a thing

Tao Lin, Taipei

Canongate, 256pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781782111856

reviewed by Jake Elliott

In 2009 Tao Lin told Michael Silverblatt, ‘I want to do the purest form of a certain style.’ They were discussing his recently published novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, but the purity of style he described to Silverblatt has found full manifestation in Taipei, published this June. Taipei is Tao Lin’s third novel. After publishing two novels (Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates), a short story collection (Bed), two collections of poetry (you are a little bit happier than i am and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and the aforementioned novella, Lin has developed a style that is self-consciously 'stylistic', though what ‘stylistic’ refers to is a constantly evolving set of literary tics.

In previous efforts, such as Shoplifting from American Apparel and Eeeee Eee Eeee, style seems to have been a mechanism with which to intrigue and at times baffle the reader. In Taipei, Lin's style has become inextricably married to the narrative content of the novel. It restricts, controls, ‘grins’ and then sarcastically undermines itself, but at no point does it seem preferable for the story to be conveyed in any other way.  

Taipei is a fictionalised account of the years that have passed since the publication of Tao Lin’s second novel, Richard Yates, and comprises a book tour, Lin’s marriage to his girlfriend Megan Boyle in Las Vegas and a trip to visit his parents in Taiwan. The reader follows Paul - Tao Lin’s fictional counterpart - and Erin – Megan Boyle’s fictional counterpoint – through this ‘interim period’ and beyond as they travel across America and to Taiwan, seeing the same things again and again. Taipei is laid like a palimpsest over Lin's life, in fiction and in reality (his account of these events are available through his blog, Twitter and Facebook pages).

The first half of Taipei reads as quite a juvenile effort. The opening lines of the novel will be enough to deter a low-tolerance reader, ‘It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery.’ But rarely has an opening sentence seemed more purposefully designed to deter.  

Lin is a writer with strong ties to a scene. He is still associated (principally through the activities of his publishing company Muumuu House) with the Alt-Lit community to which, depending on your source, he helped cultivate an audience or, to which he owes the entirety of his livelihood. This opening sentence and many of the niggling observations (‘When their burritos arrived he noticed, with pre-emptively suppressed interpretation, that his, of the three, appeared slightly darkest’) are perhaps operating as concessions to his heritage.

These concessions, however, are ultimately of little consequence. The second half of Taipei  is something totally different, far more complex. The repetitive dulling nature of the prose attains a strange emotional depth over time, and the reader begins to get a glimpse of something paradoxically new by virtue of being exposed to Lin’s style for longer than is comfortable.

Just as one feels this newness about to cloak their experience of the book entirely, the story ends, on a cliché, ‘looking at his feet stepping into black sandals ... he felt “grateful to be alive.”’ The speech marks here seem to indicate an awareness of the trite nature of the remark, (Lin will never let you forget his awareness) but also indicate, more logically, direct speech: the sentiment verbatim, regardless of anything else.  

These speech marks are key to a reading of this text. They make the reader concentrate on the words, doubt the sincerity of the enclosed speech and pay closer attention to the intentions of the narrator's voice. Speech marks work in the same way that Raymond Queneau's chapter headings work in his book Exercices de Style (1947) – 'Awkward', 'Visual', 'Philosophical', 'Metathesis', 'Dog Latin' – indicate that there is play at work. Unlike Queneau's headings, however, Lin's speech marks are not labelled, and so their roles shift. Phrases are singled out, but their purpose is left for the reader to determine. A more self-assured writer would have felt comfortable in setting out a consistent purpose for punctuation. Instead, Lin rewards the reader with access to a gateway of potential consciousnesses.  

The real Bildungsroman in Taipei takes place in the narrator’s manifestation of Paul’s sub-conscience. There are stock Tao Lin devices, huge amounts of drugs, a small amount of inconsequential shoplifting and lots of ‘grins’ (minus the ubiquitous ‘shit-eating’ of Lin’s earlier work), as well as the belief that to set a scene is to list the items of food a character has just purchased and/or ingested, ‘Paul was alone, a few hours later ... on 20mg Adderall - after eating most of his organic beef patty with an arugula salad containing flax seeds, alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, tamari, lemon juice, flax oil.’ The narrative style is best summed up by the protagonist's description of his approach to consciousness when on ‘MDMA, two Ritalin and an energy drink’: 

Whenever Paul sensed familiarity in the beginnings of a thought or feeling he would passively focus on intuiting it in entirety, predicting its elaboration and rhetoric in the presence of logic and world-view like a ball's trajectory and destination in the presence of gravity and weather. If he recognized the thought or feeling, and didn't want it repeated, he'd end its formation by focusing elsewhere.

The exploration of processes of interiority evinced in Taipei is slightly different to most of Lin's previous work; the sense of his narrative being alive is no longer dependent on the disruption of syntax or the use of demotic speech. Instead, the writer has begun to develop a much more fundamental relation between writer and medium. 

Queneau understood this relation to be the expression of philosophy through the use of vernacular language. Exercices de Style illustrated this by telling the story of a man who gets into a bus and starts a row with another man who he assumes is stepping on his toes deliberately. The narrator then repeats the same story in ninety-nine stylistic variations. Queneau described this approach by saying that ‘the first statement of this new language should be made not by describing some popular event in a novel (because people could mistake one's intentions), but ... to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.’

In his attempt at the ‘purest form of a certain style,’ Tao Lin appears to be in dialogue with Queneau's ideas. Much like the Exercices de Style, the language of Taipei’s often brutal illustrations of Paul and Erin's relationship transcends the anecdotal through exhaustive use of the anecdote. This is never more apparent than in the drug-addled 'what-if's' Paul and Erin fabricate together: 

Paul and Erin were constructed by the young man's unconscious for verisimilitude, as passersby in the peripheral vision of his imaginary next trip to McDonald's. Their memories were not based on a concrete reality but on the meager imaginative powers - enough for only a very short-term, working memory - allotted for the ‘artificial intelligence’ of peripheral passersby. 
 

This is illustrative of a problem often experienced by Paul, ‘How to actually cope with life?’ as well as by the narrator, ‘How to express Paul's problem in words?’ The results is a deep meditation on how to find the requisite words and mechanisms to make sense of our lives. At another point, Paul’s inability to express himself is related to ‘a telescope a child had turned, away from a constellation, toward a wall.’ I wouldn't call Tao Lin a self-assured novelist, but his new focus on consciousness has at least made him a better one. Lin senses that something is vividly lacking from the culture in which he lives. Taipei endeavours to convey this sense of lack using the appropriate tools: language which lacks, imagery which lacks, personalities that lack. This essential notion of absence is part of what makes the novel’s absence, once it is finished, so acutely felt for the reader.  

Perhaps the best way to think of Taipei is as a kind of science-fiction. The idea of the novel is not situational or even narrative-based. The idea is that Paul exists. That Paul is very nearly Tao Lin, or in part or even partly, Tao Lin. Paul is a man who doesn't acknowledge that life outside of a computer, of the moment, is any less valuable or real than lived reality. The choices that Paul makes daily, how much MDMA to ingest, who and what to look at on his MacBook, how much arugula to buy, what to fuck around with in Whole Foods, are the dominating concerns of his existence. But they are not even concerns, they are moments of desire with all emotional discourse stripped away in the presentation, left to linger in the sub-text.  

The sci-fi of Taipei expands through the narrator's trance-like remove and Paul's psycho-stimulant consciousness. It is reflected in sentiments that Lin made in Eeeee Eee Eeee: ‘Each moment ... is just a moment. Time is like, a thing.’ Taipei is a performance of this remove, and that overarching absence is continually represented metaphorically: ‘he felt, and remained there - away from the keyboard of the screen of his face’ and ‘he’d felt a sensation not unlike clicking “send” for a finished draft of a long email.’ Lin seems to be hinting at the realisation, as Barthes would put it, that ‘to be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore.’
Jake Elliott is a graduate of Modern and Contemporary Literature at University College London. He is currently writing his first novel.