author: Tao Lin

name: Steev

average rating: 3.18

book published: 2009

rating: 3

read at: 2011/09/21

date added: 2011/09/21

shelves: novels

review:
I'm not sure what to think of this book. It's kind of cool because it's all about young hip people doing things that are supposed to be fun, like going to clubs and seeing bands and going out drinking and wandering through parks aimlessly with friends saying silly things and joking around.

However, that's all it is. The writing is completely without any evaluation or judgment of what's going on, it's simply all description, with almost no access to the characters thoughts or motives. And even the description is oddly vague, as if the consciousness from which the narrative viewpoint comes is simply incapable of comprehending or making sense of much that's happening around it. At times this style is sort of refreshing in its strangeness: "they listened to people in other parts of the city doing things." "He touched a thing that was on the table."

In the end though, I come away from this mercifully short book with sort of a bleak sense of meaninglessness, which might be Tao Lin's point. Perhaps the idea is to simulate the empty void of modern life, or modern life lived through the haze of antidepressants and other mind-altering pharmaceuticals. It's completely surface, which is part of the definition of post-modernism, but this book is disturbing in its lack of realism - since I believe even the most un-introspective, stupid, and drugged out person would still have some inner monologue that others would be able to at times deduce. Ultimately this novella appears to be just some sort of literary experiment or art-world prank, which makes sense in the context of the author's other career activities, which are delineated in one of the longest back-jacket bio blurbs i've ever seen.