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Published on 5/7/08
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“I used to consider myself depressed,” Tao Lin tells TONY at an East Village coffeeshop. “Now I try not to think in terms of happiness or depression—I just think in terms of whether I’m productive or not.” If that’s the case, then the 23-year-old Brooklyn-based author must be feeling pretty good about himself these days. In addition to diligently maintaining his heavily trafficked blog, A Reader of Depressing Books, the prolific Lin is an editor at the online magazine 3:AM, has written a book of poetry and is now gearing up for the publication of his first two books of prose, the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee and a collection of short stories called Bed. It’s the first double-book fiction debut since Ann Beattie released Distortions and Chilly Scenes of Winter simultaneously in 1976.
Lin, who got his B.A. from NYU in 2005, is presenting himself as something of a literary phenomenon—a DIY writer who’s making a name for himself without an M.F.A. or a mainstream publisher (both of his new books are being put out by the indie press Melville House). A stickler for creative control, he once canceled the publication of his own chapbook when he disagreed with changes suggested by an editor at Future Tense Books. He recently accepted a poem from his mom for 3:AM “because she writes simple, declarative sentences without clichés and does not have a pose.”
Lin’s own fiction mixes unpretentious prose and a robust sense of the ridiculous. Eeeee Eee Eeee concerns the travails of Andrew, a twentysomething pizza delivery guy with a penchant for intellectual contemplation and zero career ambition. Andrew spends a good deal of his time pining after a girl named Sara, but he also finds himself in a series of bizarre situations, discussing the meaning of life with President Bush and watching a poker game played by Salman Rushdie.
Obviously, this is no ordinary tale of alienation in the burbs. The novel’s title refers to the sounds made by a band of homicidal dolphins whose sinister agenda is to kill Elijah Wood and other real-world luminaries (there are some no-nonsense talking bears on hand too). The reasons for the hobbitcide are never made clear, but Lin claims that he means the actor no harm. “I like Elijah Wood. I don’t want to kill him,” he says. “The dolphins probably wanted to murder him because he’s small and easy to kill. He seems pretty gullible.”
Quotes like this suggest that Lin is pursuing the absurd for absurdity’s sake, and yet his fiction, even at its most willfully strange, feels entirely genuine. His intense descriptions of alienation, boredom and curdled ambition have won the praise of artists such as Miranda July. And for all of Lin’s antiestablishment attitude, his work owes plenty to old-fashioned storytelling. On his blog, he recently claimed, “I want someone to review Eeeee Eee Eeee and call me the Asian John Updike.”
An Updikian minimalism is on full display in Bed, a collection of nine stories that are mainly concerned with romantic relationships and how they fall apart. The stories lack Eeeee Eee Eeee’s talking animals but exhibit the same brand of earnest and offbeat existential meditations. In stories such as “Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow,” Lin reveals a knack for capturing how romance can slip into patterns of inexplicable meanness and going-through-the-motions numbness. His characters come off like postcollegiate Rabbit Angstroms for the 21st century.
Lin, to put it another way, is a newfangled writer with some excellent old-school storytelling techniques. But part of his charm is that he doesn’t care about labels or modes of expression. He’s as satisfied cranking out entries on his blog as he is writing books that will become paper-and-glue commodities. “It’s pointless to talk about the death of print, the pros and cons of the Internet, and the end of literary criticism,” Lin says. He isn’t worried about the medium, or about who publishes his work. He just wants to write, and this ambition has produced an adventurous new talent.
Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed (Melville House, $15.95 each) are out now. Lin reads Sun 13 and Wed 16.
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