Tao Lin: The literary phenomenon of our generation?

Two years ago, author Tao Lin gained notoriety for selling shares of his unfinished novel on his blog. For two thousand dollars, readers bought the future royalties of the highly anticipated "Richard Yates," a story in which the two main characters are named Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning.

These gimmicks are nothing new for Lin, who is known more for his overt self-promotion than artistic legitimacy, and has published several short story and poetry collections all while maintaining active Blogger and Twitter accounts. He has built a reputation for integrating the modern, technologically advanced and environmentally conscious generation he represents into his work. Lin is now touted as the literary phenomenon of the Internet age. 

His last publication, a short, autobiographical novella entitled "Shoplifting at American Apparel" revolves around the day-to-day life of a young, Taiwanese-American, struggling author who recently graduated from NYU. The character advocates a vegetarian, free-trade, sweatshop-free lifestyle and has a proclivity to steal batteries and t-shirts that lands him under arrest (Lin himself has been arrested twice for shoplifting). The book served as Lin's jump into the mainstream literary world and the modest white and light blue cover can now be found at Urban Outfitters and independent bookstores. Like "Shoplifting," his newest literary effort, "Richard Yates," features g-mail chats and text message conversations in addition to traditional dialogue.  

And once again, the protagonist of "Richard Yates" is a young aspiring New York writer. He falls in love with a suburban teenager from New Jersey after meeting her through the Internet. Their names just happen to be Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning. In an interview with The Rumpus, Lin admitted that the idea to name his characters after famous child actors "seemed fun and exciting," and it was easy to implement with Microsoft Word's find-and-replace function. Both characters are juvenile depressives who seem perfect for each other, except that he is 22 and she is a 16-year-old who has an overbearing mother. 

At a little more than two hundred pages, this is the longest book Lin has written. A significant portion halfway through the novel adds no exposition or character development. However, Lin's minimalist prose carries the entire novel and is reflected in the attitudes and interactions between all the characters. For example, in the index included in the back of the novel, under "facial expressions," "neutral" appears four times in the entire novel whereas "excited" appears only once and "concerned" three times. In fact, both characters make fun of the "party girls" who exaggerate emotions, especially excitement. 

Haley and Dakota themselves are straightforward in expressing their emotions, but only when each is not paralyzed by the consciousness of what the other expects of them. In the process of delineating these characters through e-mail and texts, Lin manages to capture the social anxieties of both teenagers and twenty-somethings beautifully.

In today's world, where Twitter provides people the chance to tweet and Facebook allows the option to update a status about any and every aspect of life, the endless possibilities make it difficult to articulate how one feels in an exact moment. Dakota and Haley hide their feelings from each other and the rest of the world because, as Lin points out, none of us are ever sure if what we're feeling is "right":

"At each moment you can either kill yourself, try harder to detach yourself from people and reality, or be thinking of and doing what you can for the people you like. Those are your only 3 choices at any moment. I don't know. It seems like you do the second one but say you want to do the third one."

"Richard Yates" by Tao Lin.  208 pp. Meville House, $14.95.  

Tao Lin will be reading from Richard Yates on Thursday, Sept. 23 at 7pm at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. The event is free.