Bed By Tao Lin, Melville House, 2007, $14.95, 278 pages Eeeee Eee Eeee By Tao Lin, Melville House, 2007, $14.95, 211 pages
This invite arrives toward the end of Tao Lin's short story collection, Bed, in the middle of the story, "Cull the Steel Heart...":
"Donnie's birthday extravaganza No clowns, no presents, no singing, fuck no, no cake, no nothing Sure to be a depressing time for everyone involved You shouldn't even come, please."
I've never read anything like Tao Lin's short story collection, or his new novel Eeeee Eee Eeee-- but I'd say reading these books is probably a lot like going to Donnie's birthday extravaganza. It'd be just you and Donnie, and at first you guys wouldn't have that much to say to each other. Nonetheless, you'd drive home with a smile on your face. Getting out of your car, you'd pee on your lawn.
Perhaps instinctively, we avoid life's Donnies. In silence, we speak. In unhappiness, we take pills. In boredom, we play computer games. In these moments, though, I think Lin -- a recent graduate of New York University, a blogger (reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com), and an organic vegan -- finds inspiration. Lin writes the moments you're not supposed to write.
E.E.E. is about a recent college graduate who works at Domino's. Unlike most recent college graduates, though, he meets bears and dolphins that offer him free laptop computers, friendship, and maybe a poker game or two. If you're wondering why Eeeee Eee Eeee is called Eeeee Eee Eeee, think of the sound a dolphin makes.
Bed is about a lot of people-- a depressed Denny's waitress, a ska-punk front man, Chinese immigrants and their sons who take "too many creative writing courses." Stuff happens, too. Giant squid wash ashore. People check their email and vandalize houses. These aren't stories about those events--rather, these are long looks at the spaces between events. Bed and E.E.E., for that matter, are probably closer to portraiture than narrative.
He writes about love so honestly that it hurts. His characters fall a little bit in love with Dana, who is engaged to someone else. They settle down into lovingly dysfunctional relationships. They scream about the venereal diseases they've gotten from one another. They transfer into their girlfriends' creative writing workshops "to surprise her or something." This is love that's confused, ashamed, fearful, and degenerate. And it's pretty close to the mark.
Bed's first story, "Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money than There Exists," situates itself in the twilight of Garret and Kristy's relationship, which also happens to be the month that people thought terrorists might "replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb." As Garret and Kristy's love wanes, it becomes more and more analogous to regime change. Garret finds himself shouting to Kristy about terrorists ("If a terrorist said to you that if you were late he'd kill you and your family, would you be one minute early? You wouldn't; you'd be half the fucking day early."). He gets into arguments in order to "pre-empt" heartache.
While I'd argue that there's more to Lin's work -- a lot more -- than these themes, I'd also say it's true: there's plenty of boredom, depression, loneliness, death. But Lin digs deep, exposing the ironies and the absurdities of these topics. Lin describes "the water of [the] mind," for example, as "fishless and still, though occasionally something enormous and blurry like the Loch Ness monster would roll through, in a sort of cartwheel."
The funny thing is that I know exactly what he means.
At its best, Lin's fiction can achieve the unsettling familiarity of Neanderthal skulls and Sam Beckett shorts. That familiarity -- that honesty, that beauty, that truth -- is why I'd recommend these books. They touch on all the dreams you never realized. It would be depressing if only it wasn't so totally ridiculous.