“In a café in Ann Arbor around 10:30 p.m., two days later, Paul realized, when he remembered Erin’s existence by seeing her name in Gmail, he’d forgotten about her that entire day (over the next three weeks, whenever more than two or three days passed since they last communicated, which they did by email, every five to ten days, in a thread Erin began the day she dropped him off at the airport, Paul would have a similar realization of having forgotten about her for an amount of time).”
-from Taipei
For me, Tao Lin has always been the Ghost Plant of the emergent literary world.
A rare and unusual undergrowth, the Ghost Plant has no chlorophyll; it rises from the ground ethereal in appearance, a thin reed about eight inches tall hunched over. Transparent for all practical purposes and so fragile-looking one might assume a single finger poke could quite possibly liquefy it on the spot, the plant proves to be surprisingly resilient, able to proliferate in the most unlikely of conditions. The plant thrives, for example, in southeast Georgia sand under sun-baked saw palmetto and mossy oak trees. An anomaly, it exists in plain sight, a lamp light of ghostly white pipes defying humidity, cold, searing heat, and salty air. Were you to stumble on Ghost Plants on a hike, you might find them a bit unnerving … but you certainly would pay attention.
Tao Lin’s work has been stared at, finger poked, wondered over, occasionally hated, and selectively admired. He has been taken seriously by the most serious of literary types – check out an interview, for example, with Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt. It offers at one level a curious and distracting duet of phonetic oddities (best described as a duel of monotones). It also gives insight as to why Tao gets a serious literary nod.
In fact, nearly everyone important (New York Times, London Review, Huffington Post, Salon, and others) reviewed Tao’s last book, Richard Yates. And for the most part, up to now, Tao’s work has been universally disliked.
Still, for such a purportedly terrible writer; Tao has certainly attracted all the right people in all the right places. Perhaps he appeals to so many serious literary types for his ability through blogging, press interviews, radio interviews, and book readings to appear intelligent about what he does, to come across as well read, thoughtful, intentional. With Taipei, one wonders if he has not been strategically waiting to cast this smart book upon us just as the correct chemistry of promotion, publisher, agent, twitter followers, and other important vitals coalesce. He may turn out to be less the trickster and more the surprisingly sharp entrepreneur.
I predict Taipei will most certainly be his turning point with critics. Reviewers must now contend with Tao’s writerly strengths, his honesty, insights about relationships, and quirky humor. Taipei is brilliant, clearly his most compelling publication so far … by far.
Using what he might term his ‘Lorrie Moore’ prose, echoing short story master Moore’s distinctive writing style, Tao tells the story of Paul and Erin, 20-somethings who find each other on the Internet and develop a lovely, tenuous relationship. Paul could be a version of Tao himself, a writer with a network of creative friends, an artist attending parties to locate romantic partners. A prodigious amount of drug consumption propels Paul and Erin towards one another in ways productive at times, predictably dangerous at others.
In one of their more creative enhanced ventures, Paul and Erin ingest drugs and feel that they have a new way of speaking – “the voice.” The voice amuses them as a stronger and less inhibited form of themselves, and they use it while conducting streetside interviews with movie-goers waiting in lines, in NYC cabs (they answer questions on and off drugs to test if they are more interesting one way or the other), and in Las Vegas, where they spontaneously decide to wed. They film their simple ceremony on a MacBook, convincing themselves they should be on drugs while they wed … so they seem more normal.
Paul and Erin seem narcissistic and young, and these scenes place readers in a kind of ambivalence. Do we grow tired of them? Or do we worry for them as they careen around? Either way, their abundant creativity, drug hazed or not, makes them highly productive. In an age when the young consume mass quantities of music, video, and film, Tao provides a broader statement about the difficulty and importance of giving birth to oneself in an age of shallow consumption.
The drug use does not go entirely unchallenged. Paul and his Taiwanese mother exchange extensive, pointed emails on whether drugs harm or not. At one point, Paul takes too many of the wrong kinds of drugs, and he becomes sick and scared. Such critical glimpses move the reader past Tao’s seemingly blasé endorsement of drug use; one understands his characters simultaneously live both liberated and enslaved lives. When Paul stands on a bridge in Brooklyn waiting for his drug dealer, or lies forsaken for dead in the middle of the night abandoned by Erin, Tao’s writing moves and touches.
Tao’s past work runs the gamut from a kind of existential absurdism (EEEEE EEE EEEE, a novel, features dolphins in Wal-Mart having a good cry in the circular clothes racks) to a sad, sweetly autobiographical style (BED, a short-story collection, makes effective use of negative and ironically humorous situations).
With such stylistic diversity, some readers find it difficult to enter Tao’s work. The best approach, intelligent and pleasurable, may be to navigate the flotsam and jetsam of stylistic choices with a sense of humor. When Tao names his characters Halley Joel Osment or Dakota Fanning, readers can rightly protest that his creative efforts feel random and un-crafted. This will undermine your reading pleasure if you fail to see the mischief.
From Tao’s interviews, he obviously does put great stock in craft. He is a notorious editor of his own work, poring over even the shortest tweet – Tao reports that he works on each 140-character-maximum communication for 15 to 20 minutes to make it perfect. On close inspection, most tweets employ a maddeningly effective mixture of humor and ridiculousness. (On March 13, 2013, Tao tweeted, “3wks ago when i was in taiwan i had an epiphany that there is ‘obviously’ no such thing as ‘consciousness,’ according to a note on my iphone.”
Tao’s poetry, short stories, and earlier books irritated many for all the wrong reasons (sentences too short, overuse of gchat and tweet-inspired prose). Taipei’s sentences can exceed 100 words … yet a careful reader, one willing to drop the distractions with short and long sentences or the arguments characterizing Tao as generation X plus or Y, can find moments in all his writing, past and present, that take one’s breath away. Tao can flesh out the most subtle and fleeting dreamlike moments of life with a breathtaking poignancy.
You may also have never read a book before that gives you someone else’s déjà vu. In Taipei, instead of saying, “I swear I have done this before,” one begins to ask: “Has this happened to Tao before?” Or, “I swear Tao has told me this before.”
Pre-Internet, these kinds of ‘why do I know this?” moments occurred less commonly. Authors led more solitary lives, their personal habits and daily lives generally hidden from public scrutiny. Today, numerous authors have already spent years blogging, tweeting, tumblring, and so forth. They place life events in the open, on full view. Readers can develop a kind of intimacy that used to be reserved for those on television or film, actors who made you feel you know their characters personally.
More than any other young author, Tao has forced into consciousness this popomo state of affairs. One feels familiar and intimate with him, thanks largely to an Internet presence. A blog he posted on a weekend may, a year or two later, replay in the book you read, triggering this maddening pull – one somehow knows this has happened before.
In one uncanny moment from Taipei, Paul swears that Erin shared some information with him in the past. He just knows she has told him before. But she promises Paul that he’s the first person to hear the information. Still, he scours his memory. Where he has read this before, he wonders? On her blog perhaps? Playfully Tao engages in the same behavior his own readers will entertain as their pre-knowledge gives them intimacy with him. In itself neither good nor bad, enhancing nor distracting, this sense of engagement feels noteworthy. Tao delivers a new experience for readers of fiction.
At one point in Taipei, Paul heads off with a friend to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to stare at an artist who stares at others. Marina Abramov provides several minutes of full eye-to-eye contact with anyone willing to stand in line and wait a turn. Tao brilliantly gives voice, much this same way, to nuances of important relationships, to passing thoughts that one can choose to ignore or raise to consciousness … for dismissal or, more unnervingly, interpretation. Tao interprets a yawn as the end of the relationship upended by boredom. His writing reminds us of the unsettling fact that one can stop thinking of another after a few days … so how relevant, really, is one to the meaning of another’s life?
Such revelations tickle and trouble at once. They remind us, like Marina’s staring art, that unless one actively engages with another, truly focusing, a person can disappear. We may move into another realm, other work, another conversation, a new daydream. And if relationships prove so ethereal, why do we even bother?
Luckily, one of the joys of Tao’s book is how startling and life affirming we find his ability to keep rediscovering close friends and lovers. Like Ghost Plants, they endure. They become new, again and again, just by being an important and constant presence in Tao’s life … and thanks to his ability to keep reimagining them afresh.
Dr. Carla Bluhm is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Chair of Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at the College of Coastal Georgia in Brunswick, Georgia. Her area of expertise is on the psychological effects of face transplantation on identity and is co-author of Someone Else’s Face in the Mirror: Identity and the New Science of Face Transplantation published by Praeger Press in 2009. In 2007 she bid for a “pile of junk” from Tao Lin’s apartment on eBay – unsuccessfully.