the Art of Listening in a Healing Way Torrent
Fiction
Tao Lin and the Grueling Art of Self-Healing
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LEAVE SOCIETY
By Tao Lin
In 2013, equally office of his recovery from years of abusing amphetamines, benzodiazepines, opioids and MDMA, the author Tao Lin ate ii and a half grams of psilocybin mushrooms. During the hours that followed, he came to believe that he was an alien living the life of "Tao Lin," canceled promotional events for his novel "Taipei" and put his computer into a dumpster. The adjacent twenty-four hours he bought a new computer and emailed his editor and agent to say that he would practise the events after all. Merely he was still persuaded by the mushrooms' bulletin, which was, he afterwards wrote in his strange, first-class nonfiction book nearly psychedelics, "Trip," to "leave club."
An alien living a homo life is not a bad analogue for the relationship between author and character — peculiarly when the author, similar Lin, writes hyper-observant, depressed protagonists who experience ill at ease in their bodies and whose biographies resemble his ain. His new novel, "Exit Society," spans four years in which Lin's avatar, Li, is writing and editing a nonfiction book about psychedelics, spending winters with his parents in Taiwan and the residue of his time living alone in Manhattan.
Li has left behind speed, despair and his conventionalities in Western medicine. (He refuses steroid shots for his dorsum pain.) But what he is really recovering from is existentialism, the idea that life has no meaning other than what we give information technology. He now believes that the world has an inherent purpose. To get closer to its "mystery," and to experience less grumpy, he drops a lot of LSD and eats even more cannabis. He spends hours urging his parents to quit statins and eat fermented vegetables, and organizes a half-one thousand thousand words of notes for the novel that we are reading. In the last section, he begins a romance with a author and publisher named Kay.
Li wants to leave New York and move to Hawaii with Kay, but his ultimate goal is to get out his torso. He believes that the human species, if it survives long plenty, will "discarnate" and upload into a mainframe called the "imagination." He'due south not sure how we will get there, only he thinks "crafting a planet-sized art object, a context lasting and magical enough for greater magic to appear," might practise the play tricks. A book could do it — or a human relationship.
Those who have not read "Trip" might be tempted to read Li as a comic grapheme. He watches a "documentary" on YouTube most the Hutchison result, which purports to use Tesla coils to levitate metallic objects, and believes it's real. He theorizes that the tiny dots he sees in his field of vision might be proof of an alien overmind settling on Globe. He even tells usa, right on the get-go folio: "I write novels so I know nothing." But there is no irony in "Leave Gild." Li mixes upward electromagnetic and nuclear radiation, but that detail isn't there to discredit him; it's Lin's mode of showing the work of seeking. There is something dauntless in leaving a character so undefended.
If personality is an effect of health, every bit Li avers, then literary style must be, also. Are nosotros to empathize the "existential autofiction" that Lin wrote from 2006 to 2013 — deadpan, sincere stories of millennial malaise — as symptomatic of illness? Were his characters' brains broken not by drugs or the net or commercialism, simply by pesticides and pollutants? Were they poisoned by … poisons?
The novel is, historically speaking, a form of alienation, simply with "Leave Society" Lin has set himself the project of writing an unalienated novel. Stylistically, the book is aesthetic, even radical. As a corollary to his wish for a world without domination, he refuses narrative propulsion to an about absurd degree. The move feels cyclical rather than linear, registering minuscule changes over time. Where Lin's earlier fictions were dense with social and visual information — every sentence independent at least 3 adjectives, equally if providing a full description could anchor a person to the world — "Get out Social club" is less congested. The vibe is less enervated, and dreamier.
Li has more compassion and sensitivity than Lin's protagonists have previously mustered. He'southward able to see, for case, that he and his mother are a lot akin, and to consider how his father's stint in prison shaped her. Simply despite, or possibly because of, its virtues, the novel doesn't hold the reader in its thrall. Information technology meanders, linking scenes of low-fundamental bickering in a gentle ebb and period of harmony and disharmony. Information technology doesn't seem to listen if yous put it down.
Some will compassion Li and call him a symptom of our anxious, misinformed times. Others volition phone call him an anti-vaxxer in the making, and hate him. I don't remember "Exit Society" is the great volume that will fulfill Li's dream of getting to "the other side of matter," and I don't recollect getting to "the other side of matter" should be the goal of human life, or art. Merely the novel has a vision, however croaky, an idea connected to its form, which is more I tin can say for well-nigh books.
At one point, Li is excited to go a headache; information technology gives him a chance to try cayenne pepper every bit a remedy. He takes six capsules, vomits ruby, sweats through his clothes and shivers "uncontrollably." An 60 minutes afterward he's fine. It would have been simpler to practise null, just wait for the headache to go away. But that would exist missing the indicate. Li has made many changes, merely he still wants a fix, to ready himself. At the end of the book he hopes that he will "be able to recover from himself, his nearest source of despair, in the future." This seems doubtful.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/books/review/leave-society-tao-lin.html
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