Lin has spent the past decade novelizing his life in aloof, literal-minded prose his breakthrough novel, “ Taipei” (2013), which fictionalized a drug-fuelled relationship, was apparently pared down from a twenty-five-thousand-page draft of recollections. In Chinese, du means many things pronounced with a rising tone, it could, given the prodigious homophony of Mandarin, mean “reading,” “drugs,” or “being alone.”Īs it happens, these are Li’s three primary activities in “ Leave Society,” the latest autobiographical novel from the author Tao Lin. When Li’s mother flaps the dog’s paw to wave goodbye to her business-tripping husband, Li is moved by “his parents’ sly, Dudu-mediated tenderness.” In fact, Li’s parents often unthinkingly refer to their son as “Du,” as if the name were their generic term for a loved one on his third visit to Taiwan, Li starts doing the same thing to them. When Li’s parents do attempt kindness, they often require the use of the small family poodle, Dudu, on whom they project emotions too fragile to survive the passage of direct communication.
For another, his parents bicker infectiously, often roping him in as a mediator, or collateral damage, or both. Li, in his thirties, has good reasons to view “writing, not speech, as his means to communicate ‘at a deeper level.’ ” For one thing, when he and his parents are with one another, eating fermented vegetables or walking man-made steps up a mountain, they limit themselves to short, simple phrases, speaking a “crude, ungrammatical Mandarin-English mix,” thanks to Li’s halting Chinese.
It began with their leaving handwritten notes around the house where he grew up, in Florida now, even when he visits his parents’ home in Taiwan, he still tends to write them e-mails from his room. Since Li was young, he and his mother have communicated best in writing.
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