If Only We Could
Tao Lin, Leave Society
Vintage Contemporaries, 352pp, $16.00, ISBN 9781101974476
reviewed by Miles Beard
In the documentary Psychiatry and Violence, R.D. Laing exposes the limitations of paranoia as a symptom of mental illness through his inversion of its rationale, asking, ‘What do we make of people who do not realise that they’re persecuted when they are? We haven’t even got a word for that.’ American author Tao Lin is seeking to a provide just such a vocabulary and has diagnosed us with whatever that word is.
Lin’s latest metonymic protagonist is Li, an author known for his autobiographical fiction who visits his parents and their dog in Taiwan on long breaks from his home in New York where he sees toxic structures, particles, and habits stalking round every corner. A chronic user of cannabis and LSD, Li considers himself in recovery from the harder stuff and has become a compulsive autodidact of alternative histories and medicines in the process. Between mimetic, snapshot scenes of his relationships and interior life (you know they’re mimetic because Li’s third-person narrator regularly reminds you that he’s recording everything on his phone to compile notes for his new novel), the reader is offered treatises on all sorts of lesser-known subjects: the Younger Dryas (the most recent period of significant climate change, around 12,000 years ago); the Hutchinson effect (a series of unexplained experiments in free energy conducted by one man in his home); and dominator culture (the bifurcated belief that our current patriarchal structures are an aberration in comparison with populations from prior eras).
If this gives the impression that Lin’s narrative strategy requires a dedicated and credulous reader, this is only true to some extent. He not only anticipates scepticism, and therefore provides a multitude of brief citations, he wisely lets his protagonist’s contradictions hang to subtle and ironic effect, deftly offering a wry commentary on the contradictions inherent to any value system. For instance, Li badgers his parents into having their mercury fillings removed. (Has it ever occurred to you to have this done? It certainly hadn’t to me, but the suggestion has a down-home wisdom to it like many of Li’s health-conscious proclamations.) In their search for a dentist who can do this properly for them, Li’s parents are subjected to innumerable X-rays, something we all know is definitively very bad for you. Such an unforeseen consequence passing entirely unmentioned is striking because there’s little doubt Li is aware, at least in retrospect, of the predicament he himself has placed them in. That he can’t bear to speak of it says it all.
And though Lin has provided ample fodder for scholars of ‘autofiction’ with his novel’s dizzying heights of self-referentiality, I think the safest bet is to take his protagonist at his word when he says that he writes for himself, to remember the good moments and to learn from the bad. Writing is, to some extent, necessarily an investigation of the self regardless of its subject matter. But even Lin’s artfulness feels personal, like he’s the mark of his own con. Indeed, it doesn’t take many iterations of ‘Li said’ before you naturally begin to read it as, ‘I said.’
The title is both dictum and lament, a prescription we can’t possibly fill. Although Li eventually comes to recognise that personal progress — be it physical, mental, or interpersonal — requires not the following of recipes but a sustained, active engagement with the self and others instead, Leave Society, for all its pithy humour and unashamed passion for new knowledge, is tinged with poignancy and a nostalgia for life only known in myth, dreams, and – quite possibly, it must be said — archaeological digs.
We’re told Li prefers to read nonfiction or, at a push, novels that resist plot: Lin provides for him the perfect book with its discursive, ambulatory form that suspends both. Such a style can’t appeal to everyone, but it’s difficult to imagine how he could have compounded his obsessional theories with his need to make sense of surroundings in any other way. This is a bit of a shame, because thinking more like Li could only do us good, especially at such a precarious and uncertain moment across the world and most notably in his native United States. To be sure, though it takes place mainly across 2014-2018, Lin does briefly drift into our present moment, devastatingly:
Whatever else you might think about the salubriousness or accuracy of Li’s guidance and ideas, this is a brutal, ineffable distillation of a broken society many of us would consider leaving, if only we could.
Lin’s latest metonymic protagonist is Li, an author known for his autobiographical fiction who visits his parents and their dog in Taiwan on long breaks from his home in New York where he sees toxic structures, particles, and habits stalking round every corner. A chronic user of cannabis and LSD, Li considers himself in recovery from the harder stuff and has become a compulsive autodidact of alternative histories and medicines in the process. Between mimetic, snapshot scenes of his relationships and interior life (you know they’re mimetic because Li’s third-person narrator regularly reminds you that he’s recording everything on his phone to compile notes for his new novel), the reader is offered treatises on all sorts of lesser-known subjects: the Younger Dryas (the most recent period of significant climate change, around 12,000 years ago); the Hutchinson effect (a series of unexplained experiments in free energy conducted by one man in his home); and dominator culture (the bifurcated belief that our current patriarchal structures are an aberration in comparison with populations from prior eras).
If this gives the impression that Lin’s narrative strategy requires a dedicated and credulous reader, this is only true to some extent. He not only anticipates scepticism, and therefore provides a multitude of brief citations, he wisely lets his protagonist’s contradictions hang to subtle and ironic effect, deftly offering a wry commentary on the contradictions inherent to any value system. For instance, Li badgers his parents into having their mercury fillings removed. (Has it ever occurred to you to have this done? It certainly hadn’t to me, but the suggestion has a down-home wisdom to it like many of Li’s health-conscious proclamations.) In their search for a dentist who can do this properly for them, Li’s parents are subjected to innumerable X-rays, something we all know is definitively very bad for you. Such an unforeseen consequence passing entirely unmentioned is striking because there’s little doubt Li is aware, at least in retrospect, of the predicament he himself has placed them in. That he can’t bear to speak of it says it all.
And though Lin has provided ample fodder for scholars of ‘autofiction’ with his novel’s dizzying heights of self-referentiality, I think the safest bet is to take his protagonist at his word when he says that he writes for himself, to remember the good moments and to learn from the bad. Writing is, to some extent, necessarily an investigation of the self regardless of its subject matter. But even Lin’s artfulness feels personal, like he’s the mark of his own con. Indeed, it doesn’t take many iterations of ‘Li said’ before you naturally begin to read it as, ‘I said.’
The title is both dictum and lament, a prescription we can’t possibly fill. Although Li eventually comes to recognise that personal progress — be it physical, mental, or interpersonal — requires not the following of recipes but a sustained, active engagement with the self and others instead, Leave Society, for all its pithy humour and unashamed passion for new knowledge, is tinged with poignancy and a nostalgia for life only known in myth, dreams, and – quite possibly, it must be said — archaeological digs.
We’re told Li prefers to read nonfiction or, at a push, novels that resist plot: Lin provides for him the perfect book with its discursive, ambulatory form that suspends both. Such a style can’t appeal to everyone, but it’s difficult to imagine how he could have compounded his obsessional theories with his need to make sense of surroundings in any other way. This is a bit of a shame, because thinking more like Li could only do us good, especially at such a precarious and uncertain moment across the world and most notably in his native United States. To be sure, though it takes place mainly across 2014-2018, Lin does briefly drift into our present moment, devastatingly:
On the first day of 2020, Wikipedia’s page for phytoncide was 519 words; Old Europe, 1,760 words; imagination, 3,365; turmeric, 3,574; vitamin K2, 4,187; Çatalhöyük, 4,250; forest, 6,849; Xanax, 7,529; Disney World, 8,424; statin, 11,115; nuclear weapon, 11,520; glyphosate, 16,837; CIA, 20,893; Apple Inc., 33,535.
Whatever else you might think about the salubriousness or accuracy of Li’s guidance and ideas, this is a brutal, ineffable distillation of a broken society many of us would consider leaving, if only we could.