For a start, there is very little in this novel about Richard Yates, the great, now-not-so-neglected writer of Revolutionary Road. He gets mentioned six times (I know this because the book contains, apparently for nothing but the sheer hell of it, an index), but the mentions are inconsequential, largely literary furniture, the way Beckett is mentioned a couple of times just so we know what kind of reference points the protagonists have. "I keep staring at Richard Yates' face on the back of The Easter Parade but not having any reaction to it. Just looking," says one of the characters, on Gmail chat. (If you do not know what "Gmail chat" is, then ask around. I will come back to it later.)
The two main characters spend a lot of time not having any reaction to things, or not having any reactions that Tao Lin considers worth recording. Facial expressions are recorded: the default one, we learn at the beginning, is sad. But they can also be alert, happy, bored; often they are neutral.
The characters are Dakota Fanning, a 16-year-old girl from New Jersey who seems older than her years, and Haley Joel Osment, a 22-year-old writer and poet living in New York, who seems younger than his. If the names seem familiar to you it is because the first is of an actress still in her teens, and the second is the actor who played the child who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense. Nothing is made of this.
They meet online, although how exactly is not explained. One gets the impression it is not important, that these things happen. Neither of them is ever "he" or "she"; the names are spelled out in full, always. A typical descriptive passage goes like this: "Haley Joel Osment stared at the computer screen. He rode the N train to his apartment. He looked at for-sale flyers on a bulletin board in the laundry room. He stood in an elevator. He boiled organic angel-hair pasta and carried a bowl of it to his room and sat on the floor with organic tomato sauce, olive oil, black pepper. 'I fear social interaction,' he thought while eating." Fairly early on, you realise that the whole book is going to be written like this; and, at the same time, you realise it has to be. The quality being strained after, successfully, is affectlessness.
It is all achingly hip, in its studied avoidance of the depths that literary fiction is meant to plumb. And that might be the end of the matter but I don't think it is. This is Lin's second novel, or third if you count the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel; there have also been a couple of poetry collections and a story collection. He's apparently all over the net, on Twitter, on MySpace, but as these do not appear in paperback, this column can disregard such stunts. From what I've seen, you're not missing much. The first novel is called Eeeee Eee Eeee, after the noise dolphins make, but we get, with Richard Yates, the sense of the development of ideas, of a kind of caring.
Other critics have compared him to Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis and even Jack Kerouac, and these aren't wildly off the mark, although Coupland is warmer, Ellis is nastier, and Kerouac is simply worse. But I was reminded, of all things, of the Evelyn Waugh of Vile Bodies, in terms of style rather than subject matter; mutatis mutandis, but Waugh's deadpan reporting of telephone conversations and the emotional void of his characters is just the kind of technique that is being used here.
Gmail chat, which allows people with Gmail accounts to type each other messages in a little pop-up window, is rapid-response email-lite; and Lin (thankfully) reprints these conversations as any conventional novelist would normal conversation that is, without the typos and abbreviations people use when texting. But although you're going to have to read this if you want to make it even look as though you're keeping up with the latest literary trends, there is still something old-fashioned going on here: a concern for people, for the truth, a wish that lives could be lived better.
