One of the great pleasures of following a writer’s career from the outset is the opportunity to watch the birth and evolution of an artistic vision, the way that it crystallizes or shifts with the publication of each new book. Like many in the mid-2000s, I discovered Tao Lin, the originator of the literary genre “alt-lit,” after reading one of his droll short stories in some random web journal. It immediately struck me that here was a writer who’d appeared fully formed not only stylistically but also thematically. Lin wrote in a detached style about detached characters whose only goal, it seemed, was to maximize their detachment continually until they reached a state of unfeeling Zen — the only escape, he suggested, from the anxiety-inducing tribulations and psychic assaults of mainstream society.
Lin was immediately popular within the budding alt-lit scene, which revolved around loosely connected web journals trafficking in fiction written in imitation of his trademark detached style. With the publication of novels such as Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009), in which the protagonist’s main mode of communication is Gmail Chat with a writer just as alienated as he is, and Taipei (2013), in which a perpetually drugged-out narrator floats between Taipei and New York City, Lin perfected the voice he’d honed in those early short stories. All of this to say that a reader of Lin knew what they were getting when opening one of his books: a narrator, clearly a stand-in for Lin himself, doing drugs and disassociating in such a way that you half expect him to transform into a wisp of smoke by book’s end.
This vanishing — both author and character leaving humanity behind — has always been the logical endpoint of Lin’s fiction, and much of the pleasure of reading him is in finding out how his project of detachment and disappearance will play out from book to book. So, when I heard about his new novel, Leave Society, I thought, “This is the one where it finally happens.” With that on-the-nose title, I expected Leave Society to be the book in which Lin and his narrator finally disappear completely. Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Leave Society is a novel not of disappearance but of rebirth and attachment to the things that truly matter.
The novel opens with yet another Lin-like narrator, Li, a writer working on a novel and a nonfiction book, visiting his parents in Taipei, where he’s getting checked out by doctors for a chest deformity that’s been plaguing him since adolescence and has resulted in multiple lung collapses. Early in the book, it is made clear that, in sensibility and in tone, this is a different type of Lin novel: “In the past year, inspired by philosopher Terence McKenna to try to understand his own reality, Li began to pay less attention to fiction and newspapers, and magazines, and more to scientific journals, independent researchers, non-profit organizations, and non-fiction books. The world seemed more complex, terrible, hopeful, meaningful, and magical than he’d previously thought or heard.”
Leave Society, which takes place over four years as Li bounces back and forth between the United States and Taipei, is a book about recovery. Lin’s earlier work was about anesthetizing oneself, while his later work, starting with Trip (2018), a nonfiction account of his interest in psychedelics, is about transcending alienation and finding solace in nature and family, like the ancient hunter-gatherer communities that “[worshiped] nature in the form of female deities.” Li is recovering from not only years of heavy pharmaceutical drug use but also a pessimistic worldview that rendered the universe devoid of joy and wonderment.
Li bases his recovery on living and interacting with his parents during his weekslong visits to Taiwan. It is during these extended stays that Li, who is attempting to fix his chronic pain and health issues with homeopathic and other natural remedies, develops a new artistic vision: “Li had suspected since middle school that he was constantly being poisoned and/or that he was cursed. Tracing his feelings back to things and culture, to molecules and ideas, the past two years, he’d felt surreal wonder, realizing that both and more seemed to be true — he was radioactive, malnourished, dysbiotic, degenerate, brainwashed, braindamaged.” Unlike previous Lin narrators, Li, having realized the cause of his lifelong afflictions, no longer wants to disappear. Instead, for the first time in his life, he feels like an active agent, a participant in his own life. Leave Society is indeed about leaving a sick society, but more importantly, it is about reentering a different kind of society, the healthy society of family, love, and nature. Only through leaving, Lin seems to be saying, is one able to live.
Lin’s themes have changed, but his trademark style of obsessively cataloging everyday minutiae in a cold, clinical manner remains. In previous books, this style was used to detail drug use and aimless interactions, narcotizing the reader. In Leave Society, it describes night walks with his parents and dinners with family members, creating a cumulative effect that is crucial to Li’s moral and artistic transformation. In continuously hanging out with his parents, in attempting to ameliorate their marital dysfunctions and introduce them to natural remedies for their health problems, Li is learning to be a well-adjusted person guided by patience and love. The steady accrual of these slice-of-life moments culminates in a scene unlike any other in Lin’s catalog, when Li says goodbye as he leaves Taipei after his last extended visit: “‘I’ll miss you all,’ said Li, looking at each parent’s face, and they group-hugged. He’d last told his mom he’d miss her when he was maybe ten. He couldn’t remember ever telling his father.”
Lin has always been on the fringes of the mainstream, but Leave Society is completely and thrillingly out of step with the contemporary literary zeitgeist. Here is a novel unconcerned with the culture war or conventional politics of any sort, a book that attempts to tackle the big, human questions without resorting to the pussyfooted playfulness of so many of our critically acclaimed novelists. This is a novel that challenges conventional wisdom on diet, vaccines, and the history of the planet while name-dropping books such as Cure Tooth Decay and Bugs, Bowels, and Behavior. Leave Society is about the importance of gut health and spending time in nature and loving your friends and family. It will probably be ignored or misunderstood by the ideology-poisoned commentariat that rules over the society Li is trying to leave. It was up to Lin, a writer who for so long seemed completely disconnected from his humanity, to write the most deeply human book of the year.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
