An Asian American Concession
If Tao
Lin is “a new literary voice to watch, and reckon with,” there is little to see
and less to reckon with. The notion of
watching a voice is a signal of 21st century taste, of the failure
of many contemporary critics to ponder their reasons for glorifying trash. You have to give Tao Lin credit for
exploiting the malaise that infects contemporary American literature and for
pandering to readers who are passively paranoid, easily gulled by the
hypertextuality of minimalist experimental writing. In this sense, Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007) is a cheap
fix. You have to give Lin credit also
for understanding, in ways only the very young can understand, how American
society progressively devalues its cultural capital. He knows that you can’t
expect better in a society that wears an aura of self-deception. A society that worships a god who is only
green paper. Why try?
Lin’s
novel is a generous toilet into which he dumps the pure products of the WASP
imagination:
David Lynch films, Honda Civic, Denny’s, Batman, Domino’s
Pizza, Wal-Mart, Lucky Charms, Cheerios, MTV, Mel Gibson, Target, Kmart, Schopenhauer, Jean Rhys, Spiderman, SUV, Braveheart and Mulholland Drive, a president who utters what everybody already
knows ----“Politics is a pretend game where it is very important to block out
the information that it is a pretend game”(195).
After you finish reading Lin’s novel, flush the toilet.
Flushing
the toilet accomplishes little more than the sound of rushing water, but you
feel better for having given sound to the silence of this ethnic American
novel. Lin does not have to underline
the Asian presence you find in fiction by Amy Tan and Gish Jen. That presence is announced by the fact that
the most intelligent characters in the novel are a bear, a dolphin, and a
moose. The signifying monkey of Lin’s
imagination speaks his mind.
Born in
1983, Lin belongs to a generation of writers who create under the influence of
hip hop, a generation programmed and predisposed to make cynical critiques of
post-everything. Their literature of
exhaustion secures a fragile referentiality in a gumbo of brand names and
clichés, seasoned with a few grains of cultural literacy. The exceptions are works that avoid the
potholes of pretend naturalism and realism by walking along the pathways of
speculative fiction and by pulling up the primordial roots of story. Lin is young.
If he is smart and more than tendentiously witty, he will recognize what
a dead end the aesthetics of trash is.
He has begun his journey to what from the perspective of Asia is the Far
East. If he is smart and a genuine
writer, he will recognize the gift ethnic American literatures can make to the
republic of letters in the United States.
Eeeee Eee Eeee is exotic
wrapping paper, an Asian American concession looking for a box to decorate.
September 8, 2012
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