“The saying doesn’t apply to me,” said Li’s dad. “I’ve never met anyone who talks as much as you,” said Li’s mom. Loud, talkative people were shallow, like river rapids, he explained. …Li’s dad said, “Calm water flows deep,” quoting someone from Three Kingdoms. ![]() More than that, Leave Society introduces the reader to two of the most endearing literary characters in recent memory: Li’s parents, simply referred to as Li’s mom and Li’s dad-and their beloved family dog, Dudu, who serves up a great deal of comic relief. (Despite the autofiction tendencies of his work, one never has to worry about Lin attempting to paint his protagonists in a flattering light.). Those hoping for a more traditional narrative like Tao Lin’s 2013 Taipei, in which he captured the highs and lows of his character Paul’s young marriage in a cringe-inducing level of detail, may be disappointed.įortunately, the same level of lacerating honesty in Taipei is present in Leave Society, which keeps the narrative compelling. Working on his nonfiction book’s second draft for five hours each morning after a brief job and two hours each night after dinner, Li entered a flow state, which he viewed as whenever life felt enjoyable, he wasn’t idle or bored, and he didn’t seem to be ignoring his problems but addressing them in a long-term, premeditated manner-times when, easing into resonance with nature, minutes to weeks passed in a novelty-clouded, calmly emotional, deathward trance. ![]() ![]() This creates something of a paradox, in that so much of Leave Society is about its own drafting process-Li’s writing practices, notes from his editor, transcripts of conversations with his parents that he records for content-it at times feels like there’s no real novel here, merely an outline: Not long into the novel, Li begins drafting two books: one of which we assume to be Tao Lin’s 2018 nonfiction title, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, and the other we take to be the book we are in fact reading. A 2005 study…had found an average of two hundred types of industrial compounds, including car emissions and banned pesticides, in the umbilical cord blood of American babies, he told his mom.” Li’s synthesis of the nonfiction books he reads make up a large part of Leave Society, as authors like Terence McKenna cause him to cast doubt on the traditional historical narrative and health-related books inspire him to convince his parents to alter their diets and have the mercury removed from their dental fillings: “Li said modern people should feel unhappy, due in part to toxification. Li begins this journey toward wellness by cutting himself off from most social contact, including romantic entanglements narrowing his drug use to carefully portioned amounts of cannabis and LSD researching topics such as world history and natural health and spending several months out of each year with his parents in Taiwan in an attempt to repair the strain his past behavior placed on their relationship. ![]() Though the story takes place over several years prior to 2020, its main character maintains a hermetic lifestyle many of us can relate to at present, whether we’d like to or not: “… isolating himself in his apartment in Manhattan, replacing pills and friends and most of culture with cannabis and books, and finding new interests…” Leave Society continues Tao Lin’s tendency for autofiction by following a barely-disguised stand-in, a millennial novelist named Li as the book opens, we find Li determined to make changes in his life following what he finds to be a toxic cycle of drug abuse (“He’d been addicted to amphetamines, benzodiazepines, and other pharmaceutical drugs for three years”) and unhealthy relationships with both his wife (their divorce procedures extend over much of the novel) and his parents.“In four of his five relationships, he’d gotten depressed,” the book tells us, “leading, through general negativity and his blaming habit, to complaints, causing everything he thought or said to seem like a veiled or open insult, as in his parents’ relationship.” If part of the success of any novel involves timing, Tao Lin perhaps couldn’t have chosen a better moment for Leave Society (352 pages Vintage) to have come out than during an extended pandemic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |