Continuous 360-Degree Motion: Tao Lin’s Richard Yates – Manuel Marrero
August 26, 2024
I first found this book in a trash can in lower Manhattan c. 2010. I couldn’t finish it. I gave it to a friend who hated it. I didn’t really know what alt lit meant then. I had just moved to New York. By 2012, I shared a highly stereotypical loft-style apartment with a rotating ensemble of roommates in Brooklyn. Our living room TV’s screensaver was mostly cycling images from Marie Calloway’s Tumblr when Girls wasn’t on. My ex-girlfriend said it was misogynistic. Tao Lin and Marie Calloway put on a reading that year at an apartment nearby. Tao Lin read short stories in monotone about cats. I didn’t know what to make of him. Soon, I collected nearly everything under the sun of alt lit, names who are footnotes at best now, forgotten, “canceled” at worst, with some exceptions. Alt lit was an in-joke among my circle, with few exceptions. I thought I had stumbled on a new literary movement that hated reading; omphaloskeptic, brand-laden, unserious. In hindsight, the nonplus I felt then was the calling card of the avant-garde, a rite of unlearning, truly radical, best encapsulated by Richard Yates and its kitchen sink minimalism. It’s the kind of little miracle he couldn’t repeat if he tried. The book induces a state of interminable scrolling, hijacking your internal monologue about fifty pages in. It’s disturbingly prescient. I don’t know how or if Tao Lin knew that “typing things on Gmail chat” would come to prefigure the way people live now, or rather, are beginning to notice this omnipresent lifestyle at critical mass and wholesale rejecting it after letting it consume them, but Lin was early. While Gmail chat would obsolesce, the world for many would consist of constant consumption of digital information and communication. They would form major relationships on the internet. Time would cease to be divided into categories like date night or movie night, everything would be happening all at once, and often abruptly to derailing effect. The romantic relationship Richard Yates presents is exceedingly familiar, with almost pathological verisimilitude many would later seek to emulate, a document of predictable behaviors that still shocks. The conflicting narratives about a person are borne out in the siamese dichotomy of virtuality incarnate. Not always superficially apparent the couple aren’t simply talking to each other in person, the book would grow to be hugely influential with me and my peers. The narrative arc is besides the point. The book is too human to narrativize.