Shoplifting From American Apparel
by Tao Lin | Review by J.A. Tyler
I feel like something has changed, something is missing.
I feel this is not what it used to be.
I feel there is a difference.
Go backwards:
YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM grabbed my attention because it masqueraded as poetry but was something else, was pseudo-diary entries, was a narrator with a voice unafraid to be simply nothing, to simply be.
EEEEE EEE EEEE was a novel I loved because there was this robotic, monotone flatness but it was surrounded by the surreal, by dolphins and bears, and as reader it was fascinating, writing I had not seen done in this particular way.
BED captured the sense of Tao Lin in shorter pieces that were not poetry but had the same poetic sensibility, that told the stories from his mouth and knew how to drop them at the end, how to fracture their emotionless surfaces.
And COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY had a new skin too, collected more of the same voice and style of poetry but set together under a thematic umbrella, poems clinging to one another by arms of connective content-tissue.
Now:
SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL has the robotic malaise, but there are no dolphins, no bears and underground traps, no clever animalistic wreckage in the narrative. SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL has the monotonous voice that has made Lin moderately famous in our lit world, but the poetic forces are held back, stricken. SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL has the sense of Lin’s intonation but has forsaken the seemingly desirably gmail chat structure for standard, plain dialogue: he said, she said, he said, she said.
I have always been a fan of Tao Lin, but I fear that SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL is a soundless drop in a bucket maybe already too full. There is little music in its pages, little newness. And there is even the feel that perhaps Melville House or Lin himself held back in places where, if he had let go, if he had let the text strike out in the directions it desired, would have created a distinct novella amongst two poetry collections, a novel, and a set of stories.
Yes, there is some redemption: SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL ends with a meaningful yet curt and emotionless objectivity, asking us as readers what we wanted to be when we grew up, knowing that we haven’t made it, and may never. But it is a long road to go for that little glimpse, a load of pages missing something inherently Tao Lin, begging to be more than what it is.
The future: RICHARD YATES.
Will I pre-order that one from Tao Lin, hoping for something I have never seen, something new?
Yes.
Will I like it, be impressed, be in love again?
Maybe. We will see. We will see.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is a male human.