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Many
artists wouldn't know what to do with total freedom. How can
a work of art convey meaning if it does not adhere to the
rules of reality? This is a conundrum particularly in writing,
where it takes little effort to conjure the bizarre and impossible.
Tao Lin's two-book release—consisting of a novel, Eeeee
Eee Eeee, and a short story collection, Bed—exploit
this instant-gratification aspect of writing to expose existential
absurdities, as well as just to be ridiculously entertaining.
In Eeeee
Eee Eeee (that's five e's, then three, then four), a pizza
delivery guy named Andrew drives around town, gets his roof
torn off by a bear who offers him a free laptop computer,
and is insulted by an angry dolphin who has crying fits in
Target. Other events involving Elijah Wood and Salman Rushdie
crop up around what is basically a weirdly articulate inner
monologue of a man in his early twenties. Meanwhile, the stories
in Bed are part of the same world, though they don't
share Eeeee Eee Eeee's outright absurdity. Most of
the stories follow the trajectory of a socially inhibited
young man, living at home or in a big city, trying to make
lasting relationships and failing.
Tao Lin's
fiction may seem at first glimpse like a mindless mishmash
of our latest cultural images, relayed in a deadpan voice.
But true randomness is artless, dull; there is a pattern in
this chaos. For one thing, there are motifs beyond the absurd
images, such as physical clumsiness, lack of control over
one's facial muscles, and boredom. Most importantly, the writing
is so entrenched in a generation-specific irony that it would
be impossible to glean anything from it without a particular
sense of humor. Tao Lin is an incredibly sarcastic writer—someone
who can make Dave Eggers & Co. look like earnest, Disney-fied
Boy Scouts.
Almost
like a cliché, the humor in these books is a thin skin stretched
over a giant abyss. The characters in Tao Lin's fiction are
deeply depressed. They think they might be "all right at living,"
but this is a fleeting feeling, replaced immediately by something
totally unrelated, like eating sushi or dressing up as a giant
squid. There is hardly ever a connection between emotional
epiphanies—without which the books would be completely
aimless—and the events that actually happen, in real
life. In portraying this, Tao Lin has hit on the very root
of what it means to be depressed. The quiet disarray of the
characters' emotional response is what makes the core of these
books. It's in stories like "Nine, Ten" or the Ellen segments
of Eeeee Eee Eeee that the third-person narrator slips
into the heads of other human beings, and gives the books
their most lasting moments.
A new
kind of language is at work in these books, too, used most
often to describe abstract things—feelings, periods of
time—in ways that are constantly creative and fascinating.
Characters feel, at one point or another, "bigoted," "shadowy,"
"eradicated," and in one case, "homeless and addicted to heroin."
Again, what might seem like pure randomness is rather the
mark of an interesting new voice. Bed is overflowing
with combinations of words that surely, no writer anywhere
has put together before.
The stories
in Bed seem to parody a sweeping, nostalgic tone used
by workshop fiction, though it is left behind after the first
paragraph. This is the opening of "Nine, Ten":
People
got a bit careless that year. Band-aids were forgone,
small wounds allowed to go a little out of control - to
infect a bit. Jobs were quit. People woke early-evening
or mid-afternoon, fisted ice cream bars, wandered from
their homes - only a little bit depressed - and walked
diagonally through parking lots.
Relating
these singular and mundane events in a tone most writers save
for dramatic matters of life and death is effective. If "everything
is just one thing," being bored and going to a sushi restaurant
three times in one night are just as epic as plane crashes
and sexual affairs. It takes an original voice, though, to
make such things worth reading in novels. Tao Lin doesn't
waste our time.
(June,
2007)
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