Reading Tao Lin

I discovered Tao Lin earlier this year when I found an essay he wrote about autism for a right-wing internet journal. The essay is totally unpersuasive, and Lin’s style of argument is unserious and annoying. He claims that autism is caused not by genetics, as is generally believed, but by environmental poisons, and furthermore that a special diet can sometimes remove or combat these poisons and cure autism and that he has cured his own autism this way. The list of supposed environmental causes of autism includes glyphosate, microplastics, 5G radiation, SSRIs, and seemingly everything else Lin doesn’t like about modern society. Any medical research that contradicts his thesis he dismisses as the propaganda of “big pharma” and agribusiness and “corporations.”

The piece has a mood of conspiracy and reads like the work of a crank. It’s more than 7,000 words, and I read the whole thing, all the way to the footnotes (there are 127 of them). I disliked the essay very much, and yet I found myself thinking about it afterwards, strangely affected. Something about the craziness of it, the intensity, most of all the belief of the author, stayed with me. Not just his belief in this particular idea but his general attitude of belief, the fact that he was capable of believing. This is a person, I thought, who might believe, really believe, in UFOs, in life after death, in the spirit world; this is a person who might write good fiction. I bought one of his novels, Taipei.

At first Taipei is just as off-putting as I could have expected. There’s the flat tone for which Lin is known. Flat and unemotional, with an eccentric fixation on the mundane: many of the early pages of the novel are taken up with long descriptions of the protagonist’s banal thoughts, long, difficult-to-follow sentences full of subordinate clauses whose meaning, when it finally arrives, rarely justifies the effort it took to get there. Bad writing, that is, awkward sentences and unnecessary words. It seems unedited and uneditable, dumped onto the page. Endless descriptions of drug use. Awkward conversations that go nowhere. I had only been aware of Tao Lin as a trendy writer, an internet presence, and an aggressive self-promoter, and this persona couldn’t help creeping into the reading of the novel. The flatness and anomie seemed done for effect, to provoke, as if by a rude teenager. “Inflicted” was the word that kept coming to me: this person is inflicting his unhappiness and alienation on me.

Nevertheless I kept going because the book is easy to read and takes place in a setting – New York City hipster kids – that I recognized. At some point I realized that the flatness, the unpleasantness, the focus on the awkward and uncomfortable, are not just a pose. Every other young writer I could think of uses their disaffection to get attention and sympathy and love. They make a picture of their unhappiness and then step away from it and want applause. Not Tao Lin. There’s no escaping from this consciousness. The alienation does not get cashed in. It just goes on and on.

It also helped that eventually something does happen in the novel. Paul, the main character, meets a girl, and the new couple get married impulsively. Soon enough, the relationship sours, and drug-fuelled young love turns to awkward misunderstandings, painful conflict, and misery. As I read on, the novel became more and more compelling, until I found I had to put off everything else I had to do and finish it. It was like an unpleasant flavor that at some point I had started to crave. By the time the book ended, the initial impression of pretentious attention-seeking had disappeared. What’s more, it turned out that all along there was a plot. The book is the story of a young man who can’t stand to be alive because he finds his own consciousness unbearable. Over the course of the novel he tries, half-heartedly but persistently, without really understanding what he’s doing, to kill himself by taking massive quantities of drugs. Finally he takes a dose he can’t handle, thinks he’s really going to die, and decides this may not be what he wants after all. Only with the very last scene did I realize that this death wish was driving the story the whole time.

What we call talent, the ability to make art, is not separable from the need to do it. Many writers have some ability, but not, really, when it comes down to it, the need. So they write things that are of no interest to anyone. This is not the case with Taipei. Despite the flatness of Lin’s style, you come away from the novel with the sense of having witnessed a life-or-death effort to communicate.

Lin has an active Twitter account in which he describes his isolated life in rural Hawaii and discusses fad diets and crackpot theories with fans, colleagues and friends. He calls the covid vaccine a “corporate medical product” and doesn’t believe in sunscreen or the Big Bang. It’s the kind of thing that would be immensely irritating in a normal person, even a normal writer of talent, and yet somehow in Lin’s world all this seems to be made of a different substance than ordinary nonsense, just like literature is made of a different substance than regular prose. I like reading his Twitter and I always step away from it with a certain lightness. There’s something invigorating and pure about it. It’s all wrong, but there’s no bullshit.