09/08/09
Text: Joe Coscarelli
At the start of Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel the protagonist, Sam, happens upon some crass wisdom amid his bored stupor while Gchatting with an online acquaintance (or his closest friend―both, probably):
"We are the fucked generation."
There is no weight attributed to his claim―negative weight, maybe, considering the circumstance, as this is not a book of revelations. The one-liner is a mission statement but it is also antithetical to one. It is a representative selection from an endless tributary of aimless online chats. Neal Cassady's letters these are not. This is not the Beat Generation and it's sure as hell not the Lost Generation.These are not the American Romantics or the Transcendentalists. Instead, Lin's characters wonder: "Do you think in five years the national media will create a stupid term like 'blogniks' to describe us." There is no question there.
Sam, Lin's own stand-in throughout his largely autobiographical novella, is an author, too. They have roots in Florida, degrees from NYU and Taiwanese parents, recently relocated overseas, though Lin's depression and apathy come across less pathetically than Sam's, as a more sharpened social critique, if not feigned altogether. Sam represents a harsh self-assessment. He is ineloquent for a writer and his one-dimensional starkness is reflected in the book's terse prose and dry tone. Sam's go-to descriptor, when somehow riled passed his default flatline, is "fucked." He wonders "Are we fucked" every so often, but the query is beyond rhetorical and never includes a question mark. In this estimation, "we" are self-conscious by birth, but dispassionate by choice. Or maybe it's the opposite. It's irrelevant.
The Fucked Generation is what happens when parents consider their children's university educations an endgame. It follows the replacement of slackerdom with neo-hipster unemployment: a few passable books for an independent publisher, a middling Amazon.com sales rank, but pride from Mom and Dad. It's the result of another check in the mail to subsidize a sub-bohemian lifestyle of organic vegetables and fair labor denim.
Lin first published a prototype of this story over a year ago appropriately enough, in Vice magazine, probably not two pages from a risqué ad for the LA-based clothing chain from which Sam eventually steals. At the time, Lin called the recounting of his petty theft and subsequent jail time a fictionalized true story and revealed that the "organic vegan restaurants" he referred to were Pure Food and Wine, Angelica Kitchen and Sacred Chow―all overpriced New York City establishments.
But Shoplifting is honest in the sense that these characters inhabit a real world at a real time. Perhaps it is the defining work from a specific moment few will remember, as it is confined to a handful of zip codes mostly south of 14th St. and east of Broadway, plus the L and G subway lines. Though the characters spend some time in dismal Gainesville, Florida, the work is quintessential Big City aughts. To call Shoplifting a line in the sand would be to misuse the cliche by over-scaling the question's importance. But the existential challenge remains: Are the musings from within the young, over-privileged and online-obsessed urban milieu worthy of extrapolating to youth culture writ large or are the self-depracating, self-obsessed "issues" they raise too insular, detached and insignificant to apply beyond the Olympic stadium of navel-gazing, i.e. New York City?
Where you fall in this already overwrought dichotomy might dictate your taste for Shoplifting if its literary style weren't so specific. Lin's 103-page inside joke relies on a narrow set of allusions too sparsely described as to be widely relatable: Suicide Girls, Tompkins Square Park, freegans, and indelibly, Gchat; Sam gets by selling sex stories to Nerve.com for $500 a piece. His personality, though, might be less accessible. He is shy but without a filter, inarticulate but appropriately random and thoughtful but crippled by his self-awareness. Depending on the diagnosis, he might find a spot on the autism spectrum near Asperger's syndrome, but forfeiting social cues works on girls who drink Kombucha the same way a British accent might slay a chick who watches Grey's Anatomy.
But his somehow endearing, if always stifled romantic encounters are told with the same distance and derision-by-omission that characterize the entire book. Lin either employs a one-note sarcasm or empathy, but it's difficult to discern as a comment on the world he barely describes or armor parading as aloofness. The insecurity is palpable and it may be to the author's credit that it is nearly impossible to separate the work from its maker. Lin, after all, has crafted himself (largely online) as an impenetrable iconoclast, a literary outsider, but an Everyman―so long as your man assuages his social anxieties through email.
It is the same unyielding minimalism of word and feeling Madison Smartt Bell dismissed in a 1986 Harper's essay titled "Less is Less" and that Tom Wolfe called "anesthetized"―writing "disingenuously short, simple sentences" about "real situations, but very tiny ones." Writers like Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Ann Beattie were bunched together and labeled under the derisively classist awning of Kmart Realism. But in an era of irony and reappropriation, why shouldn't Tao Lin own the epithet cast at authors he so admires? With Shoplifting From American Apparel, he has reclaimed the style, recast it in an online age and stripped it of its economic implications, so as to remove the charge from the term. Now, the poor choose Wal-Mart, while Lin reads the Style section and drinks four-dollar fermented tea. Let's call it what it is―Whole Foods Realism. It beats the blogniks.
Buy Tao Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel here. Lin reads several times in New York this week: September 8th at Book Court, 9th at Spoonbill & Sugartown, 10th at the New York Public Library, 11th at Brooklyn Book Festival, and 12th at Bluestockings. Visit his website for more information.
