He fears glyphosate, pesticides, and Crest toothpaste. He is constantly identifying new toxins, diagnosing new vectors of inflammation. He reads about natural health, traditional medicine, volcanic minerals, vegetable capsules. But Li, distrustful of Western medicine, refuses a prescription for steroids, preferring the holistic approaches he researches on the Internet from his arthritic solitude. A doctor at a rehabilitation center eventually diagnoses Li with ankylosing spondylitis, a rare form of spinal inflammation. Chronic back pain limits Li’s ability to move and work on his novel (the one we’re reading) to manage the pain, he relies on LSD and cannabis, both of which he takes freely in his Manhattan apartment but must sneak into Taiwan. With “Leave Society,” Lin continues his autobiographical project by narrowing its scope even further, until only he and a small handful of others remain. Lin’s books of autofiction have made him something of a darling in the Alt Lit scene, where their disaffected sincerity has earned him the title of (although we have so many of these now) the “voice of his generation”-namely, the millennial one, with its infinitely mediated sentimentality. Lin has spent the past decade novelizing his life in aloof, literal-minded prose his breakthrough novel, “ Taipei” (2013), which fictionalized a drug-fuelled relationship, was apparently pared down from a twenty-five-thousand-page draft of recollections. In Chinese, du means many things pronounced with a rising tone, it could, given the prodigious homophony of Mandarin, mean “reading,” “drugs,” or “being alone.”Īs it happens, these are Li’s three primary activities in “ Leave Society,” the latest autobiographical novel from the author Tao Lin. When Li’s mother flaps the dog’s paw to wave goodbye to her business-tripping husband, Li is moved by “his parents’ sly, Dudu-mediated tenderness.” In fact, Li’s parents often unthinkingly refer to their son as “Du,” as if the name were their generic term for a loved one on his third visit to Taiwan, Li starts doing the same thing to them. When Li’s parents do attempt kindness, they often require the use of the small family poodle, Dudu, on whom they project emotions too fragile to survive the passage of direct communication. For another, his parents bicker infectiously, often roping him in as a mediator, or collateral damage, or both. Li, in his thirties, has good reasons to view “writing, not speech, as his means to communicate ‘at a deeper level.’ ” For one thing, when he and his parents are with one another, eating fermented vegetables or walking man-made steps up a mountain, they limit themselves to short, simple phrases, speaking a “crude, ungrammatical Mandarin-English mix,” thanks to Li’s halting Chinese. It began with their leaving handwritten notes around the house where he grew up, in Florida now, even when he visits his parents’ home in Taiwan, he still tends to write them e-mails from his room. The novel dips dangerously into metafiction, with Andrew in the middle of ""writing a book of stories about people who are doomed."" The characters' repetitive thoughts and conversations become strangely hypnotic, however, and Lin's sympathetic fascination with the meaning of life is full of profound and often hilarious insights.Since Li was young, he and his mother have communicated best in writing. 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 ""Eeeee Eee Eeee"" 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. When at one point, Andrew states that he wants to ""wreak complex and profound havoc"" upon capitalist establishments such as McDonald's, it feels like Lin is attempting the same kind of attack on organized art. 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. Poet and blogger Lin's debut novel uneasily documents the life of Andrew, a recent college graduate working at Domino's Pizza while over-analyzing every aspect of his life: past, present and futureless.
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