Noteworthy Novelist: Tao Lin (SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL)
by Andrew Hall
Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog (http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/blog/) and a writer on online colleges and universities for the Guide to Online Schools.
Tao Lin has been described derisively as a “stunt novelist” on more than a few occasions, a consequence of his aggressive, borderline parodic internet presence. Despite being an almost painfully soft-spoken person who reads in an unceasing monotone, online he tries to get people to give him money and publishes essays in a distinctively minimal style built on quotation marks used to distance speaker from meaning.
Across a run of novels, short stories, and poetry, he has simultaneously drawn in and enraged audiences worldwide whilst also influencing many writers who adopt his minimal style for themselves. He has written profiles on himself to parody profiles on Jonathan Franzen, published Gmail chat dialogues, and may or may not be Carles, the anonymous writer of Hipster Runoff, one of the most notorious music blogs to ever take off.
Shoplifting from American Apparel, his first novella, is not-so-loosely based on his own life. It follows Sam, a writer living in New York, through two shoplifting arrests (one at American Apparel, the other at New York University’s bookstore), fragments of relationships, conversations with friends, inane jobs, the writing process, and the restlessness that drives young people to continue living even when, as Sam puts it early in the novel, he’s a part of the “fucked generation.”
To communicate the combined restlessness and listlessness at the center of his character, Lin presents Shoplifting in an extremely straightforward, detached style reminiscent of other K-Mart Realists (think Frederick Barthelme, perhaps Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver without the gut punches, several of whom he acknowledges as influences). He writes in simple sentences that describe action in a way that communicates exactly what happened, but doesn’t necessarily answer the Why of it. For example, the titular shoplifting incident and subsequent arrest are reduced to a description of the character walking into a store, walking out of it with a shirt, then getting caught with no moment taken to explain the internal processes driving his motives until later.
As a consequence, Lin’s writing amplifies the sense that his characters don’t have great answers to the questions they’re faced with, and this feels more than a little appropriate for a novel about young people trying to find their place in a society that hasn’t necessarily welcomed them in any meaningful capacity (Lin, at a question an answer session recently held in Seattle, said that he had made a total of about six thousand dollars from his writing over the last five years, and much of this came from selling shares of a then-forthcoming novel in an experiment).
Unlike much of Lin’s other work, Shoplifting reads quickly (it can be finished in a few hours) and never feels like much of a slog, which his collection of short stories, Bed, often did. While the novella doesn’t necessarily stay as engaging as it is at its highs, it benefits from its brevity even in its final sections, as Lin takes his protagonist to Florida, where he mostly watches folk-punk bands play music and kisses girls. However, even in that final section, he beautifully captures the inanity of such experiences, something that’s far more relatable than it ought to be.
Though Lin is an author who deals pretty openly with alienation, depression, and the feeling of being lost in the world, Shoplifting is his most accessible, least crippling work yet and one surprisingly worth the brief time commitment it demands.
Andrew Hall
blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog
