The Tao of Plot

Tao Lin is no Richard Yates.


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Sep 8, 2010

"Literature and the world are full of women who don't come home, of women who die in brutal accidents," thinks Julián, as he tells his stepdaughter a shaggy-dog story about a pair of trees, to distract her from the fact that her mother is quite late coming home. "But at least in the world, in life, there are also women who ... have a flat tire in the middle of the avenue and nobody stops to help."

Julián's stories are the focus of Alejandro Zambra's delicate, aimless novella The Private Lives of Trees (Open Letter, July 20). Zambra nests them in a long night, which starts out with the promise that the book will continue until the mother returns, but then meanders through a stepfather's worries and concerns, bumping against the boundaries of a familial love triangle. The stories Julián tells and the one he inhabits have an open-ended, naïve simplicity. In their clean lines and resistance to easy resolution, they would nestle nicely among the motley collection of jokes and parables and koans that Scarlett Thomas sprinkles around Our Tragic Universe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Sept. 1). Like Zambra, Thomas is interested in uncertainty, in resisting the consolations conventional plots offer. One of the chief strains running through Our Tragic Universe is the search for a "storyless story," a narrative that resists formula, and because of that resistance can actually show reality.

Thomas is a fearsomely intelligent writer, one who knits together the fringes of hard science into something erudite, simultaneously heavy and light. But Thomas' preoccupation with constructing a storyless story knots Universe into a metaphysical clove hitch: It's a non-genre novel by an ex-genre novelist about a genre novelist attempting to write a non-genre novel which takes shape as a catalog of the difficulties of writing a non-genre novel.

If that sounds like more of a hot mess than a tantalizing puzzle, it is. As sharp and engaging as Thomas is when she gets swept up in tangents, Universe adds up to a self-dramatizing spectacle. One of the parables she cites, fittingly, is a single-paragraph story about a map that becomes so detailed it takes up the same amount of space it describes. Universe's storyless-story investigation looks like that map, and ultimately just creates an appetite for the next book, the one that benefits from the therapy this one undertakes.

The storyless story is a dilemma of selection: choosing which details to pull out to craft a representation of life. The dilemma, then, lies less in the experience than in the tools used to transmit it.

Tao Lin, on the surface, would seem to possess tools calibrated to produce this brand of realism. His characters, most recently in Richard Yates (Melville House, Sept. 9), inhabit a world of surfaces, with Lin avoiding extended description of external scenery or internal contemplation, restricting himself to conversation (as often virtual as face-to-face) and brief skims of surface thoughts. He's also prolific, shamelessly self-promoting, and a nurturer of the backlash against his style.

Lin's novels aren't difficult to read, despite his provocations. With everything flattened out, muffled and smoothed by nondescript narration, the reader winds up in the same cotton-wool anomie as Lin's characters. It's like depression. Or like the side effects of a powerful antidepressant. Consequently, Richard Yates conveys the illusion of generational authenticity, with one foot in a virtual world and the other in meatspace, sealed off by earbuds, dressed in American Apparel, lacking an inner life or the moral need to create one.

This may well be Lin's intention, but his stylistic choices — the lack of affect, the awesome randomness of detail, the way conversation and chat and text are displayed identically and equally — are so strong and overriding that they carry the emotional and thematic weight that his characters cannot.

Richard Yates uses this deadpan to pull focus close in on a pair of unfit lovers, and it invests their interactions and their love affair with the hyperdrama of adolescence. This close focus becomes increasingly claustrophobic; the last third of the book downshifts ickily, with the demanding, controlling boyfriend hounding his increasingly submissive teenage girlfriend. The feedback between Lin's form and its effect, between the solipsism of trivial conversations and the cruelty they generate, belies the book's title, making this story anything but storyless. Lin is no Richard Yates; here, in his attention to technique and effect, in his production of grotesquery, he's actually more of a little Hitchcock.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)