Name: Leave Society
ISBN: 9781101974476

Tao Lin

A bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives--as an artist, a son, and a loner. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL. In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds--year by year, over four years--he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether? In his most recent work, Tao Lin delivers an engrossing and hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together that builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance. Exploring everyday events and scenes--waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals--while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin spins the ordinary into something monumental, and shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history.

Leave Society

a hopeful treatise amidst nihilism. not the pessimistic variety but rather a descriptive, positive nihilism that in the severe lack of meaning we find ourselves while in contemporaneity, there exists  an out — by going through. against the travails of immediacy tao lin encourages us to take things as they come and as they are: “maybe slowly was the only way to reach the other side of matter”. hardly a novel take, lin hand-holds us across this journey of profound self-discovery, self-loss, and self-recovery.

the novel is split into four parts. first of which is “the year of pain”, and although the other sections aren’t named as such, pain features prominently in the novel. lin is nudging us: pain is existence, and existence is pain. the chronic issues with his body like his caved-in chest, the back problems that come with it, gum receding, the works. pain is a fact of life. his solution is far from elegant. the answer being nihilistic drug use that allows him to dissociate and “observe” his body as an external entity. on the other side of that, the way that he goes about his life and seemingly improves on it through dealing with people honestly and frankly, even helping is mom and dad repair their relationship they don’t seem to mind despite the bickering and rudeness, ensouls him, and helps him come to terms with his pain as well. i dont relate to this large of an extent, but everyone i know practically has an ailment afflicting them for which they take medicine or try to fix. be it the morning sinuses, a nagging back pain, IBS, or even the occasional flash of red at the back of the head. 

although not dealt with directly, as he grapples with the different pain he faces, he looks to alternatives medicine. away from the orthodoxy, and refuses to listen to the doctors who refuse to listen to his ailments and that of his parents. to alleviate their chronic pain, they turn away from pharmaceuticals, to “holistic” methods, like organic foods, detoxing, and attention to Qi. this, to me, is a very empathetic view (if not that of his personal experience) of why and how people distrust medical authorities. after all, if they are not listening to your body, only you who inhabits your body can make decisions about it. it relies on a premise of groundedness and extreme objective self-awareness.

the title of the book encapsulates exactly what tao lin promotes here. facing ailments? they are not your fault, he gently tells you. all you have to do is leave society, and create your own community who understands you, and understands your body. i’m not sure if i fully agree with the solution, but he sure paints a rosy picture of the possibilities of doing so. it must be mentioned that the profile of the protagonist is that of a writer from an upper-class background whose father went to prison for white collar crimes. hardly a salt-of-the-earth man.

overall, truly, hopium for a world that feels so bleak. this feels like one of those happy sufjan stevens songs.

Ghee

a hopeful treatise amidst nihilism. not the pessimistic variety but rather a descriptive, positive nihilism that in the severe lack of meaning we find ourselves while in contemporaneity, there exists  an out — by going through. against the travails of immediacy tao lin encourages us to take things as they come and as they are: “maybe slowly was the only way to reach the other side of matter”. hardly a novel take, lin hand-holds us across this journey of profound self-discovery, self-loss, and self-recovery.

the novel is split into four parts. first of which is “the year of pain”, and although the other sections aren’t named as such, pain features prominently in the novel. lin is nudging us: pain is existence, and existence is pain. the chronic issues with his body like his caved-in chest, the back problems that come with it, gum receding, the works. pain is a fact of life. his solution is far from elegant. the answer being nihilistic drug use that allows him to dissociate and “observe” his body as an external entity. on the other side of that, the way that he goes about his life and seemingly improves on it through dealing with people honestly and frankly, even helping is mom and dad repair their relationship they don’t seem to mind despite the bickering and rudeness, ensouls him, and helps him come to terms with his pain as well. i dont relate to this large of an extent, but everyone i know practically has an ailment afflicting them for which they take medicine or try to fix. be it the morning sinuses, a nagging back pain, IBS, or even the occasional flash of red at the back of the head. 

although not dealt with directly, as he grapples with the different pain he faces, he looks to alternatives medicine. away from the orthodoxy, and refuses to listen to the doctors who refuse to listen to his ailments and that of his parents. to alleviate their chronic pain, they turn away from pharmaceuticals, to “holistic” methods, like organic foods, detoxing, and attention to Qi. this, to me, is a very empathetic view (if not that of his personal experience) of why and how people distrust medical authorities. after all, if they are not listening to your body, only you who inhabits your body can make decisions about it. it relies on a premise of groundedness and extreme objective self-awareness.

the title of the book encapsulates exactly what tao lin promotes here. facing ailments? they are not your fault, he gently tells you. all you have to do is leave society, and create your own community who understands you, and understands your body. i’m not sure if i fully agree with the solution, but he sure paints a rosy picture of the possibilities of doing so. it must be mentioned that the profile of the protagonist is that of a writer from an upper-class background whose father went to prison for white collar crimes. hardly a salt-of-the-earth man.

overall, truly, hopium for a world that feels so bleak. this feels like one of those happy sufjan stevens songs.

D D D 

“Taipei” but hopeful and healthy. Change from a posture of boredom to one of awe :) it’s just a tiny leaf

jack

i have a lot of thoughts on this. i think it is noble in presenting a path forward that isn't nihilistically peddling something, nor is it appealing to a process outside oneself to work itself out before any sort of bettering can be done. reminds me of the revelation levin has at the end of anna karenina (notably levin serves as tolstoy's self-insert in that text... something to be said there), where one must work every day to be better; enlightenment is not continual progress but has good and bad days. elsewhere in the novel i was frustrated by how hegelian it was re: history while denying any sort of western philosophical heritage. as a reading experience it is a lot less fun (to my eye) than taipei was. i can't tell if that is due to subject matter or style. i've been telling everyone in my life to read tao lin since i started reading taipei and no one has taken me up on it. whatever. here's a passage from this one i found particularly enjoyable:
"History could be like a years long stay in a forest-garden, observing and enjoying and learning, instead of a crazed visit, running through in an hour, out of breath and confused, yelling and killing. Maybe slowly was the only way to reach the other side of matter–not crashing through with time machines or electromagnetic interferometry, but crafting a planet-sized art object, a context lasting and magical enough for greater magic to appear.
The final, history-ending spell could be a book or a relationship."

Katie Chua

i think this book is personally more satisfying having read taipei. i know of people who haven't and still liked this book but this book seems more meaningful knowing that the same author who wrote a book like taipei also wrote this book. strangely hopeful. it made me want to hug my parents and thank them and also tell everyone i lvoe that i love them and i'm sorry for all the annoying things i do, it's probably because we're all being poisoned by living in modern society. but, and this but is important, we should all try and do better

Stuart Romanek

From the acclaimed author of Taipei, a bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives—artist, son, loner—as he spins the ordinary into something monumental. An engrossing, hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together. In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds--year by year, over four years--he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether? Exploring everyday events and scenes--waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals--while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, as it builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL