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May 17, 2014lukasevansherman rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
Is Tao Lin the most obnoxious writer working today? Here's a sample sentence from his latest novel: "Around 4:30 a.m., after deciding to use all their cocaine before leaving for the airport, they recorded Erin licking cocaine off Paul's testicles and serving cocaine off an iPhone to Paul reading a purple-covered Siddhartha. . ." This nicely sums up what the book is about: a boring couple hanging out, doing drugs, having sex and using Apple technology. Lin is skillful at capturing the zeigeist of the post-literary era and in that sense, he is perhaps the quintessential contemporary writer, eschewing old values like plot, character or good writing in favor of almost blog-like posts about the minutiae of 21st century life, which involves a lot of proper nouns, from Raymond Carver to McDonald's to Kurt Cobain to Whole Foods. Bret Easton Ellis, who knows a thing or two about shallow writing, calls him "the most interesting prose stylist of his generation." Substitute "irritating" or "insufferable" and Ellis, who is name checked in the book, is right on the money. Lin's style has less affect than Steven Wright on downers and his irony is so deep and pervasive that it becomes strangely sincere. If literature is dead, Lin is the one-eyed king of whatever is left.