Discovering the 'real' Tao Lin in 42 minutes

4:41. 3I am walking along Pine St., crossing 12^th Ave. with lethargic and uncertain steps. My stomach is slightly unsettled.  Is it from the drinking last night, or is it because he is here at this moment, in my city? 

4:50.  Author Tao Lin is at Elliott Bay Books to read from his latest book, "Richard Yates".  I'm afraid to see him in person, afraid of the "larger than life" character.  He is not simply the Internet persona he's been cultivating over the years, alongside an impressive literary oeuvre. I reach the bookstore, enter, and descend the staircase to the basement.

5:02. "Dao Lin," the man says into the microphone.  "We are honored to have Dao Lin come and read from his new book." I laugh with pretention. The man doesn't know, but I do.  I've seen the Youtube clips of Lin's reading. I've been to his blog, previously addressed as "reader of depressing books", and now simply, "heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com" (Yes, that is letter for letter Lin's website URL). I know Tao, not Dao.

Dao Lin approaches the stage, and I am taken aback. He looks thin and fragile, with a green tea in hand, ruffled collar, hoodie, glasses. He immediately knocks over the light on the stand.  "Sorry", he says in his signature, quiet monotone, grinning at the batteries fallen out on the floor. And he reads.

"Richard Yates" is Lin's third book of fiction. The novel seems to deal with the theme of illicit love affairs—or at least, that's what the back cover suggests (the self-description is a single question: "What constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?"). However, the book fails to address this issue, though not due to a shortcoming of Lin's, but rather—If I know Tao—because the book is in fact not about illicit sex. It is one of the non sequiturs that Lin fills the book up with, from the title of the book to the names of the characters, who are hilariously named Hailey Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning.  In last week's edition of "the Stranger" (which is by the way, one of the most hilarious satires I've read in some time), Lin himself calls the title "Richard Yates" a "low-level non sequitur". This is one of the prevalent traits of Lin's deadpan, minimalistic writing style. The back cover of his last book, "Shoplifting at American Apparel", simply stated the words, " The inmate with the mop held back the inmate without a mop."

If the title does not provide the level of truthful representation readers may be looking for, the cover image will. Pictured is a young man holding a conch shell in front of his face, opening it up to the outside, the viewer. Held vertically, the feminine implications are not lost, and serve to complicate the man's own identity. 

In the book, characters open themselves up to each other in ways metaphorically as graphic as this cover.  Characters seem almost too self-reflexive in this sense; too aware of themselves to notice how deeply they affect one another. Characters, in attempting to dissect themselves, ironically lose the identity they desperately seek. Hailey Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning often state reach these states of confusion, relating to each other self-aware thoughts through Gmail chats like, "I feel bored of life. Or wait. I don't know.  Never mind."

5:24. Tao Lin finishes his reading and asks for questions. He expands on a book he is working on about hamsters, saying, "I draw each hamster in Photoshop and then describe it and have cooking tips and hunting tips." 

It seems the real Tao Lin just wants to have a good laugh writing the things that he himself would want to read. Someone asks him why he wrote last week's piece in "The Stranger."

"It seemed really funny," he says. "It seemed like a funny and exciting thing to do.  Funny…fun, and exciting."  He seems like one of us, just a regular 20-something year old.  And I can't think of a better person to, as Time magazine originally described Jonathan Franzen, "show us the way we live now," than one of our very own.