tao lin promotional post (part seventeen)

review of e.e.e. & bed in rain taxi by spencer dew

reviews of e.e.e. & bed in publishers weekly (below)

EEEEE EEE EEEE: A Novel
Tao Lin. Melville House, $15 paper (212p) ISBN 9781933633251

Poet and blogger Lin¹s debut novel uneasily documents the life of Andrew, a recent college graduate working at Domino¹s Pizza while over-analyzing every aspect of his life: past, present and futureless. He drives through the suburbs reminiscing about college life in New York and his ex-girlfriend, stopping occasionally to express his boredom to his best friend Steve. When at one point, Andrew states that he wants to ³wreak complex and profound havoc² upon capitalist establishments such as McDonald¹s, it feels like Lin is attempting the same kind of attack on organized art. The novel, while short on plot, makes abrupt shifts in setting and point of view, and is pierced throughout by celebrity cameos and surreal touches: bears, dolphins (who say ³Eeeee Eee Eeee² to express emotion, in spite of their ability to speak like humans), Salman Rushdie, and the president make grandiose declarations that are heavily saturated with the same sardonic wit displayed by Andrew and his friends. The novel dips dangerously into metafiction, with Andrew in the middle of ³writing a book of stories about people who are doomed.² The characters¹ repetitive thoughts and conversations become strangely hypnotic, however, and Lin¹s sympathetic fascination with the meaning of life is full of profound and often hilarious insights. (May)

BED: Stories
Tao Lin. Melville House, $15 paper (296p) ISBN 9781933633268

This set of nine pseudo-autobiographical, woe-is-our-generation absurdist tales updates Oblamov for worried 21st century slackerdom. Lin’s characters will be familiar to MySpace denizens, whether they’re struggling through college in a busy city, stifling in an exhausted relationship just for the body heat, or missing their parents (but not knowing how to tell them without sounding as if asking for money). Settings are cheekily vague: “Love Is A Thing On Sale For More Money Than Exists,” about a much-needed break-up, takes place during “the month that people began to suspect terrorists had infiltrated Middle America,” while “Nine, Ten,” a love story about two nine-year-olds and their divorced parents, occurs during the year that people “got a bit careless.” As precocious children, depressing descriptions of urban pollution and beached marine life pile up, it becomes clear that Lin’s subject is the inadequacy of conventional tools and wisdom for coping with the era of the War on Terror: “Was the future now? Or was it coming up still?... all that was promised… was not here, and would probably never be here. They had lied. Someone had lied.” Such observations make the flat, matter-of-fact prose and aimless pop culture references come into vivid focus. (May)