on reading

postscript

A caveat to this: I am only about a quarter of the way through the book. Perhaps Lin’s Ellis impersonation is just a big bait-and-switch. But I have a hard time seeing this novel turn into another kind of book.

on a word in tao lin’s new novel

This is a sentence from Tao Lin’s new novel, Taipei:

Because his Mandarin wasn’t fluent enough for conversations with strangers—and he wasn’t close to his relatives, with whom attempts at communications were brief and non-advancing and often koan-like, ending usually with one person looking away, ostensibly for assistance, then leaving—he’d be preemptively estranged, secretly unfriendable. 

Those are my italics. “Unfriendable,” not “unbefriendable.” Someone who cannot be “friended,” not someone who cannot be “befriended.” 

“To friend,” of course, is something that happens on Facebook; “befriending” happens in real life. Lin’s sentence is very much about real life: the protagonist cannot make friends with his Taiwanese relatives because of his poor Mandarin.

So what is the Facebook verb doing there? Has Lin made a mistake?

The most obvious defense is that Lin is using a technique that literature folks call “free indirect discourse”—that is, he is making his narration sound like the character’s thoughts. Nearly every novel does this: the writer wraps himself around his character, and so when the narration says (to borrow James Wood’s example) “John cried stupid tears,” we the readers know that John himself thinks the tears are stupid. So maybe the Facebook word comes not from Lin but from his character? Maybe this character has lost all distinction between the internet and life, between friending and befriending?

Well, no. One of the gimmicks of Taipei (a novel with many stylistic gimmicks) is its refusal to use free indirect discourse, to enter into the inner life of its protagonist. Everything is narrated in a sort of middle distance deadpan, in terms that Paul (the character) would never actually think (especially all the metaphysical crap that the novel sometimes veers into—but more on this in a later post). We never get anything in Paul’s own terms. Lin seems to find his character’s language so insipid that he brackets it off in scare quotes:

Paul began, at some point, during the ninety minute discussion, to feel a mocking, sitcom-like conviction that, for him “too many years had passed” since college…

Paul asked if she wanted to eat at Lodge, which had “good chicken fingers”…

Etc. The narration is so carefully not Paul’s that I have to think “unfriendable” comes from Lin himself, that it’s his mistake, that he doesn’t realize how Facebook has infected his language.

And maybe it is just that—a mistake. But a critic doesn’t bring something like this up unless he thinks it reflects a bigger problem, and for me, the whole problem with Taipei is in that word.

Lin has tried to write a Bret Easton Ellis novel about his generation (and mine). Ellis’s books are about how terrible and empty it is to be a young person living in L.A. in the 1980s; Lin’s book is about how terrible and empty it is to be a young person living in Brooklyn in the 2010s. And fair enough—I wasn’t in L.A. in the Eighties, but I know that there are plenty of complaints to be made about the kind of people who live in Brooklyn now, and Lin makes some of those complaints well.

But, unfortunately, he shares Ellis’s deadening lack of curiosity. If you’ve read fifteen pages of an Ellis novel, you’ve read the whole thing. Ellis is not interested in developing solutions, or testing different kinds of ways out of the L.A. problem. The idea of leaving L.A. is a powerful lure to his characters, but he’s not the kind of writer who would pursue it. You never get the sense that the characters can ever leave. It’s too deadening to be believable.

Same with Lin and Brooklyn. By page 15, we understand Paul’s vapidity. But Lin continues to give it to us. You want to shake him; you want to say, “We know that your character represents everything wrong with Brooklyn! Now do something else with him! Get him out of there, give him some hobbies, some desires! Is it really only terrible? Wouldn’t it be worse if he was a little more human and then failed, instead of being this stripped thing that he is now?”

Neither Ellis nor Lin, I think, know how to show us something else. Ellis (I think) still lives in L.A., Lin in New York. You can complain about something, sure, but when you’re too deep into it to imagine anything else, the book hits a dead end. They are more interested in staring into their sadnesses than thinking about the ways that people try to escape them. I’m not asking for optimistic art here—as much as people try to escape these things, they usually fail!—but I’m asking for art that is curious, that sees the limits of its creator and tries to move beyond them. Lin can critique the deadening effect of Facebook all he wants, but the fact that he doesn’t know the difference between “friend” and “befriend” shows just how deep he is in the culture. He’s not curious enough about words; he’s not really suspicious enough of these things. He hasn’t gotten far enough away yet.

quitting on hazard

I spoke well of Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind, so why I am quitting 100 pages in?

Hazard writes beautifully and insightfully. I’d recommend this book without any reservations to anyone interested in the period (1680–1715). 

But I never found myself thinking about the book after I shut it. That is my fault, not Hazard’s. But it also means I shouldn’t be reading it: why read a book if it has nothing to do with your life? With so little time to read, why read something that’s only beautiful and insightful? We need books that work their way into our lives.

Maybe I’ll come back to Hazard later, and maybe he’ll mean more then. For now, I’m trying something completely different—Tao Lin’s new novel, Taipei.