Tao Lin, Richard Yates

He said whenever he saw more than two things together 
he immediately thought "Look at that pile of crap."

I read most of Tao Lin's Richard Yates on the bus from Abu Dhabi to Dubai. I was interrupted by a planning-call for my upcoming trip to Baku, and by various verbalizations of the thought "I own the only copy of this book in this country," like "Even if I saw another person reading this book, he would probably be a twerp or some other kind of jackass" and "This feels like when I was reading Ulysses in the Starbucks in Erie." I wanted this arbitrary fact to make me "special," understood that it didn't, wanted to express it anyway and then make a nod to my awareness of it's being arbitrary (like this). Then I wanted to connect the arbitrary circumstances of my reading the book with its subject matter and style, but felt uncomfortable making this leap because I understood that no inherent connection exists. There is no inherent meaningful connection between any of the events in our lives, except maybe the physical matter of our bodies as we move or are moved from place to place.

Eating cereal while holding Richard Yates

Tao is unusually sensitive to the pitfalls of interpretation and meaning-making. It's why he's consistently worked toward "literalizing" his prose—cutting adjectives and adverbs, eliminating figures of speech (like "got out of" versus "left" the car), and describing only concrete characteristics (like facial expressions rather than emotions). So this is a take on realism. It makes the events described more "life-like" because each event is delivered ambivalently. So, apologies to Charles Bock and just about every other person who's reviewed this book, but that seems like it has something  do with the work of Richard Yates the writer, at least in a general sense. Richard Yates the book doesn't explain that because the allusions to its namesake are, themselves, ambivalent.

Dakota Fanning had stolen a Richard Yates novel and a Daniel Clowes comic.
They ate dinner at Zen Palace by Union Square then stood outside on the sidewalk. Dakota Fanning wanted to go to Haley Joel Osment's apartment. "I want to read my new comic book," she said. Haley Joel Osment made a noise. He said he didn't want to do that.

It's about a relationship between a 21-year-old writer named Haley Joel Osment and a 16-year-old girl named Dakota Fanning (each of whom celebrates a birthday as the narrative progresses). The narrative is also ambivalent about the age difference while the characters are concerned about the way other characters, like (initially) Dakota Fanning's mother, see their relationship: as illegal (in New York State at least) or illicit. The primary tension—and it's a powerful one—lies in HJO's being an intensely self-reflective and, therefore, selfish person and DF's being an intensely compassionate/selfless person who scourges herself for failing to please HJO. I felt depressed reading this book, but seeing that as anything but a reflection of the novel's success in placing you within the world of its characters would be a huge mistake. At the onset, it's about two depressed people who have something surprising and exciting in their lives to feel good about, each other. As a result, they can  joke about depression in cute/charming ways:

"It will never happen," said Haley Joel Osment [about visiting DF for the first time in "real" life]. "I'm giving up on life. Even more. Wait. I already did. Even more I am."

"When are you coming?"

"I don't know. I can't for a while. You have to come here. I don't have any money. You have to come here."

"Alright," said Haley Joel Osment. "When."

"Whenever you want. I finish school next week. Come before that."

"Tell me exactly when. I'm not a decision maker. I'm a person."

They have progressively less to joke about. Or, rather, they have only the same things to joke about, and the delivery becomes less and less playful or ironic. With the routine of their lives, their moods and behaviors become so predictable that the "reasons" for them are eventually dropped entirely.

At the film festival, Dakota Fanning was in the bathroom for more than five minutes... When she came out, Haley Joel Osment was upset about something. About a minute later, he was upset about something else...

To my mind, Richard Yates is an acute psychological study. It could have been called Henry James. And I think that, as time goes on, Tao's stylistic development, in terms of scope, might only offer James's for comparison. The book's representation of events differs from "real" life in that the book is a representation—behind the characters and the (nearly invisible) narration, there's this guy, Tao Lin, who's making choices (and mistakes that we can, and should, take as choices) about how he's using these tools to effect the emotions of the people who read it. Don't mistake him for his characters. Even if he does seem like an autistic veagan, the one time I "hung out" with him, all he wanted was to get a steak. He wasn't being ironic. Had we managed to find a restaurant, I think he would have eaten it rare. Tao uses everything at his disposal to make us feel a certain way, especially his persona. It's part of the fun, and that, more than any of his stylistic techniques, is what we stand to learn from him.

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Afterthoughts:

I found reading Haley Joel Osment's behaviors and thoughts in Richard Yates especially painful because of how much I identified with his stupidity and selfishness in terms of a prior relationship of mine, doubly so because I've already relived it to the extent where I hoped to never talk or think about it again. If you would like some indication of just how "real" Richard Yates is, feel free to read this gmail conversation between my ex-girlfriend and me, which took place as I was writing this review. It leads me to a point I was hoping to make about the representation of online conversation in Tao's work. He refines gmail conversation into dialogue in the same way that author's have always refined conversation into dialogue (which entails not representing every verbal tick on the page). So typos are not represented in the regular flow of dialogue, but sometimes are mentioned afterward in the dialogue or narration, like "look at that fucking typo," then the word previously represented as "fucked" is spelled out as "fckude." It's a sweet effect. Tao's able to represent online conversation in a way that doesn't make us cringe (unless he wants us to).